Two of Hearts
by Cyblade Silver
Summary: Sarah Williams, a fairly normal gamer, finds herself getting a bit more into the Kingdom Hearts game than she expected.
1. 100 Percent Completion

****

Two of Hearts

Settling down in her gaming chair, a pack of beef jerky, two Slim Jims, and a three-pack of juice boxes filled with fruit punch at hand on the TV tray she kept by her chair for times like this, Sarah Willams was prepared to go for broke. Shed already completed the game quite a few times before, so there was really no pressing need for her to go at it all over again, but now she was aiming for the difficult task of "%100 completion". So now here she was, about to begin a marathon session of Kingdom Hearts for the umpteenth time.

Popping open one of the juice boxes, she took a healthy swallow and palmed the TV remote.

Pressing the power button, she glanced briefly at the blue screen of a non-cable TV, before leaning forward and hitting the power button on her PS2. She was expecting a lot of things, the Sony logo, the indicator light turning from red to green; anything but for a bright flare of light blinding in its magnesium-like intensity to come blasting seemingly out of the console itself, and engulf her before she could do more than yelp in startled surprise. There was a sharp snapping sensation, as if some cosmic rubber band had been pulled to its limits and then released.

Reminding herself to blink, Sarah tried to clear the stars from her eyes. They didnt seem like the normal Ive-just-been-freakin-blinded-by-a-flashbulb-on-steroids stars; in fact, they almost seemed to be moving. It kind of looked like that warp effect they used on Star Trek, really.

She didnt have much time to think about that, before she was roughly slammed into something that felt a hell of a lot harder than the recliner shed been sitting in.

"Ow," she groaned, reaching back to massage a sore spot on the back of her head. "Seriously, ow."

Noticing that her surroundings were astonishingly dark for a room that was equipped with three halogen lamps _and_ an overhead light, Sarah opened her eyes. And stared up at a sky that filled with more stars than she had seen since the last time her aunt Milly had invited the rest of the family to stay up at her cabin in the Sierra Nevadas.

"Well, I guess I can safely rule out a power-failure," she said glibly, trying to find some humor in the situation so she wouldnt start freaking out; something else was starting to bug her now, though. "The hell is wrong with my voice?" she demanded, standing up and glaring at the star-filled sky. "I sound like," she paused suddenly, looking down her shirt; having finally noticed the complete absence of two particular things. "-like a pre-pubescent boy," she finished numbly, sitting down more quickly than shed stood up.

Idly running her hand back and forth over the surface shed found herself sitting on, the surface that didnt much feel like the carpet in her gaming room, now that she thought about it, she tried to make at least _some_ sense of her new situation.

"Sand?" she picked up a fistful, blinking as it ran out between her fingers.

"Sora?" a womans voice, one she almost thought she should have recognized from somewhere, started calling out then. "Sora, where are you? Honey, its time to go to bed!"

Turning to look back over her she was trying to avoid the issue of what kind of body she was actually _in_, and she didnt want to start confusing herself with pronouns on top of all that Sarah watched as an older woman came out onto what she was slowly starting to realize was some sort of a beach. _Wait, a beach? And, since I really doubt I could somehow black out walking all this way not being drunk and all and since the closest beach is-_ Blinking like a stunned horse, she said nothing as the woman whod voice she vaguely recognized took her by the wrist and started leading her away.

The only conclusion she could come to, given all the evidence that was being presented to her, was far-fetched to the point of complete insanity. _So, _this_ is what going mad feels like,_ she mused. She was trying not to take in the familiar now that she knew what to look for, at least sights all around her. Some things were just too much for one mind to take in all at it once.

The lack of light at this late or possibly early hour helped a lot in that respect, and she was grateful for it.

It really wouldnt do to have her mind completely shut down from weirdness overload, even though it was pretty well on its way to doing just that. Finding herself standing in front of a cozy-looking little one-story house, Sarah let the woman pull her inside. She didnt know just what the expression on her face looked like, but whatever it was, it was enough to get the woman to lead her to a room at the far end of the house without making any attempts at conversation. Sarah was grateful for small favors at first, but when the woman started to tuck her in, she had to quickly repress a shudder.

Part of it was the fact that she hadnt been tucked into bed since she was ten seven years ago but it was mostly the fact that a complete and total stranger was the one doing it that made her twitchy.

She still clung to the vague hope that all of this could be some kind of elaborate, multi-sensory hallucination, but somehow she was starting to get the feeling that said hope was in vain. Still laying in bed with her eyes closed, Sarah realized that there was one thing that she absolutely _had_ to take care of before she fell asleep. As a chronic shifter, she always made it a point not to sleep in anything loose, or anything that could end up tangled around her if she moved too much.

The clothes she was in now would probably end up half-strangling her before the night was over; through no fault of their own, of course.

Flipping back the covers, Sarah levered herself out of bed and began taking off the clothes that that woman had given her to wear. When she reached for the waistband of the underwear, though, Sarah paused. There were just some things she was _not_ ready to see before her morning shower. Leaving the underwear in place, Sarah climbed back into the bed and snuggled herself deep into the covers.

__

I really hope this is all a dream; itd be too freaky to deal with otherwise, was her last coherent thought before she drifted off, facing the door of a room that wasnt her own


	2. Morning Mood

**__**

Disclaimer: I dont own any of the mention canons in this story, nor the songs that Sarah is occasionally going to be singing when the mood strikes her though I will be listing them at the beginning of the chapter for those of you who happen to be curious I do, however, own Sarah herself. If youre wondering why this disclaimer wasnt in the first chapter, its because its more fun this way. ;)

Sarah/Soras song this chapter: Billy Joels "Say Goodbye to Hollywood."

KH

The next morning Sarah yawned and stretched, bending her spine and curling her toes as she waited for her iPod alarm to go off. When no music was forthcoming, Sarah turned over onto her other side and relaxed. It seemed like itd be awhile before she had to get up for school, either that or it was a weekend.

Either way, the end result was more sleepy timer for her, so she wasnt going to complain. Weekends were pretty much made for sleeping till noon, after all. And she had a timer on for KRDK, just in case it was a Saturday, so there were no worries about _that_.

Pulling the covers up over her head, she shifted them until she an opening wide enough to accommodate her face, and then settled back down to have a bit more sleep.

The next thing she felt was the sensation of someones hands pressed up against her right flank, shaking her like there was no tomorrow. Grumbling and only half-awake, Sarah moved away from the shaking hands and burrowed deeper under the covers. Unfortunately, that didnt deter the mystery shaker; if anything it made them more annoyingly persistent. Grumbling semi-coherently, Sarah grabbed the nearest corner of her pillow and walloped the little bastard about where she figured his head would be.

Unfortunately, even _that_ didnt make said little bastard go away for very long. Still, she did manage to find out at least one thing: he was male; and pretty young if she was hearing right. None of that really mattered, beyond being vaguely interesting, and Sarah swiftly put it out of her mind as she settled back down.

The kid was talking at her again, but Sarah was opting to ignore him until he actually managed to pronounce her name right. She would have done the same for anyone else; she _certainly_ wasnt going to make any exceptions for some kid that she didnt even know. Although that _did_ kind of beg the question of just how this kid had ended up in her house at all.

It _was_ possible that shed fallen asleep at a friends house for some reason, which would explain the lack of an iPod alarm, but not the lack of other things; things that included people who knew just how much she _hated_ being shaken awake.

Not to mention people who actually pronounce her name right. Curling back up in the bed she couldnt be sure that it was actually _her_ bed anymore, but she knew what it was in a more general sense Sarah ground her teeth as she felt the kid put his hands back on her flank. Before he could start shaking her again, she pushed the blankets down off of her head.

Opening her eyes just long enough to get a bead on her surroundings, Shara grabbed a fistful of her tormentors hair and yanked it hard enough to make him pay attention to what she was about to say.

"Look, bright eyes, its a weekend, and I fully intend to sleep until _at least_ noon," she paused for breath, vaguely aware that there was probably something that she should be remembering at this point, but not particularly caring what it was. "Go the hell away."

Burying herself under the covers again, she decided to be charitable and give the little brat a few final words of warning: "You start shaking me again and Ill clock you, bright eyes."

That said though something about this whole thing was still kind of bugging her she settled back into the bed and tried to relax again.

"Sora, youre going to be late for breakfast if you keep this up," the annoying kid said, sounding like he was struggling not to laugh.

"Would it be too much to ask that you, just once, _get my name right_?" she groused, yawning as she sat up and let the covers spill off her back. "Youre still a syllable off."

Climbing out of the bed, she yawned again and scratched her head a bit. Opening her eyes partway, she got her first look though not really a good one at the brat whod been harassing her.

"Nice hair," she chuckled. "You have a thing for Kadaj, or what? "

"What?"

"Nevermind," she said, with a short, sharp shake of her head. "Just tell me where the bathroom is. I need my morning shower."

"Sora, youve never taken a shower in the morning."

"Youre claiming to know me pretty well for a guy who cant _pronounce my name right_," she said, beginning to become annoyed again. "Just tell me where the bathroom is, Kadaj-lite, and spare me the commentary."

"Its down the hall on the left, just on the other side of the linen closet," he said. "Im going to want an explanation for this, Sora."

"Just as soon as you start pronouncing my name right, Kadaj-lite."

Leaving the room, and the slightly-annoying-but-fun-to-mess-with boy behind, Sarah made her way down the hall. The first door on the left was too narrow to lead to anything but the linen closet that Kadaj-lite had mentioned, so she passed it right on by. Opening the second door on the left, she found a small but well-appointed bathroom.

Yawning and arching her back as she stretched, she tossed off her underwear after shed closed the door behind her, then climbed into the shower and turned the hot water up to full. Letting the cold water blast her awake, she climbed back out of the shower.

"Ah, thats better," she said, sitting down on the toilet while she waited for the water to heat up. "The hell is wrong with my voice?" she wondered aloud, reaching up to rub at her throat.

Her fingers found nothing out of the ordinary, but before she could make a more thorough examination, she noticed the clouds of steam wafting invitingly out of the shower.

Other considerations could wait for later; now was her time.

Climbing into the shower, Sarah sat down next to the hot spray for a few moments, leaning back periodically to let it soak into her hair, before standing so that she could start washing up. She was starting to miss her room, with its special acoustics and purpose-built sound system, since just listening to the splatter of the water could get kinda boring after awhile. Hell, she was starting to miss her personal bathroom; theyd renovated the fuck out of that old house.

It was one of the few times shed actually _cackled_ while wielding a power tool of course, that _had_ been a chainsaw, and you were pretty much constitutionally obligated to go just a bit batshit when you handled a chainsaw _Right, right; washing up_, she mused, opening her eyes just long enough to grab a bar of soap before closing them again.

She knew her own body well enough that she could do this kind of thing blindfolded; that, and she really didnt feel like risking soap in her eyes.

"Bobbys driving through the city tonight, through the lights, in a hot new rental car" she began, lathering up her hands before she started to wash her arms.


	3. The first ripples

She may not have had access to her purpose-built sound system, but she could still sing. As she lathered, then rinsed, her shoulders swaying slightly to music only she could hear she paused for a moment to examine herself. There was something a bit off about her shoulders.

For one thing, they were narrower than she remembered from yesterday; another thing had to do with the muscles of her arms, which were less developed and _far_ less toned than when shed showered just yesterday. It was strange, and it was starting to make her edgy. She didnt like being edgy in the mornings; she took her morning showers for a variety of reasons, but aside from the obvious, the foremost among them was to work herself into a state of relaxed alertness so she could handle the day.

Still, she was awake enough by this point to notice that there was something or quite a few things decidedly off about the situation.

The sound of her voice was wrong, her body felt weird, her feet looked different, her hair felt too short; but, is was only when she had started scrubbing her chest that Sarah came to fully appreciate just how utterly FUBAR things had gone. Shed been a 34 C before last night, and today she was almost as flat as an ironing board. Breathing deeply to calm her frazzled, jangling nerves, Sarah looked down at last.

What she saw there sorely tested her fragile calm.

"I could hear you singing right through the door, Sora," Kadaj-lite, who she was just starting to accept was Riku, said as he barged unceremoniously into the bathroom. "I didnt even know you _could_ sing," he continued, laughing. "What was that song, anyway?"

"Something I picked up on the way here," she muttered, trying to get her thoughts in order and hence not paying too much attention to what she was actually saying.

She was actually _inside_ the first game in the Kingdom Hearts series; only the game had never mentioned food or bathrooms, so this place was more like a fully-realized universe in and of itself. Shed enjoyed watching Sliders back when it was on TV, but this was more like Quantum Leap; shed only caught a handful of episodes of that particular show before shed lost interest. She had never imagined shed be _living _it one day, otherwise shed have tried to catch more episodes than she once had.

__

Wheres Al when you need him? she mused, with a vaguely sarcastic chuckle.

"Whats so funny, Sora?"

"Nothing," she said, with a sharp shake of her head; shed all but forgotten about Riku with all of the weirdness.

Which wasnt that good of an idea, really, since he was part and parcel of the weirdness himself.

"What do you mean?" Riku asked, and it sounded like he was coming closer. "On the way to where?"

"On my way over the cookoos nest, apparently," she muttered, lathering up her hair for the second and final time.

Shed long since decided not to confuse herself with pronouns; she was who she was.

"What was that you just said?" Riku asked, and she could see his silhouette clearly enough that she knew he was right outside the shower.

"Ill talk to you after I finish my shower," she said firmly. "I still have hot water here, and I dont intend to waste it."

"Youre not going to use up _all_ the hot water, are you, Sora?"

"If you keep blabbing at me, I just might," she shot back.

Riku laughed. "Okay, I get your point, Sora. Ill see you at breakfast."

"Later, Riku," she said, as the door closed and the minor-secondary-Hero-antagonist-whatever-the-hell-he-was of the Kingdom Hearts series left her alone in the bathroom.

Alone, in the bathroom, with the body of the main protagonist of that selfsame series. A body that she was somehow cohabiting. Well, maybe not, but she _really _didnt want to think about what Sora might be doing with _her_ body. Although, knowing him, it would probably just be panicking.

Poor kid.

She started to chuckle. "Well, I guess it could be worse. At least Im not stuck in _Bioshock_. Or _Silent Hill_," she guffawed. "Or _Doom_."

True, there were a lot of worse places to find oneself stuck than in the comparatively tame worlds of the Kingdom Hearts franchise, but that didnt mean that she was content to stay. Shed made a fairly comfortable if somewhat hectic at times life for herself back on Earth, and she wasnt going to give it up just because she was stuck in some weird non-game videogame universe. _I think I just mentally Rickrolled myself,_ she mused, chuckling as the lame joke helped her to fully regain her equilibrium at last.

Deciding that she was as showered as she was ever going to get, Sarah turned off the taps, climbed out of the shower, and started to towel off.

There was still the matter of getting dressed, and of finding a decent non-idiotic outfit to wear, which she suspected was going to be a task-and-a-half. Beyond that, there was the matter of dealing with flesh-and-blood people who up to this point had been nothing more than PS2-rendered sprites. Especially those NPCs who only had a few lines of dialogue in-game, or those whose existence annoyed her to the point where she would have liked nothing more than to track down their programmers and punch them in the face a few times.

__

Speaking of being annoying, she thought with a slight grin, tossing Soras towel down onto his bed and heading over to the closet to see what kind of outfit she could pull together. Hopefully one that was less stupid-looking than the one Sora had worn in-game, but she wasnt going to go hoping for any miracles.

Peering into the closet, she saw that there were a few decent sets of clothes in there. Shed be able to get one, maybe even two not-so-stupid outfits out of the bunch. As for the rest of them, though _Zipper fetish much?_ She thought with a chuckle.

Pulling out some long pants that werent colored _too_ gaudily for her taste, Sarah went hunting for a bag to pack them in. If she was going to be dragged all over the back of beyond, hunting Heartless and trying to save the various worlds they were threatening, she sure as hell wasnt going to go about it completely unprepared the way Sora had. Stuffing the pants and a couple of shirts that shed managed to find into the bag after having rolled them up so they didnt take up so much space she began dressing in the clothes that she had reserved for her own use.

Pulling up the gray shorts, one of the few pairs that she had found without the excessive zipper issues that the others had, she caught sight of a small book on a desk that had been heretofore concealed by the games camera-angles during shots of Soras room.

Picking it up and flipping through it, she found that it was completely blank. The little thing was spiral-bound, so it would serve _could_ serve, rather fine as either a composition notebook, or as a personal journal. After a short internal debate, Sarah decided to record her own thoughts about this little adventure. Like Jimminy Cricket, only a lot less Disney.

Finally locating a pen she wasnt about to get into the logistical headaches that using a pencil would entail she set pen to paper and began to write.


	4. Journal Entry 1

__

First observation: Sora is not colorblind, he just dresses like it.

Second observation: theres a lot more to Soras room than the in-game camera angles showed.

Third observation: Rikus hair actually is silver. Which, trust me, is a hell of a lot weirder to see in the flesh than it is in game-sprite form.

Well, here I am, stuck in the one place I didnt ever expect to even exist, and now I have to figure out what to do next. I dont think leaving is really an option; to say nothing of the fact that Ive seen no evidence of any kind of high-technology, I dont even know if I could replicate whatever kind of cosmic accident that happened to send me here in the first place.

So, I guess its like Socrates not that Socrates said:

"Better never begun, but once begun, better finished."


	5. Plans and preparations

Once she had finished sorting out her initial impressions, Sarah closed the notebook and stuck it in one of the large pockets of the gray pants she was wearing, with the pen clipped to the cover so she could retrieve them both in one fell swoop whenever she felt the urge to record some stray bit of data, or a thought that she might want to examine in more depth later.

Running her hands through Sora's disordered, gravity-defying hair, Sarah chuckled softly. Enough time spent in this kid's body, and she might even manage to figure out how his hair stayed like that all the time. Putting her hands behind her head, she stretched her back. Bending her spine until she had both heard and - more importantly - _felt_ a series of pops traveling up her spinal column, Sarah breathed out and picked up the towel she'd hung on the back of Sora's chair.

Leaving the room at last, Sarah made a quick stop in the bathroom to hang up the towel - and was profoundly grateful that she didn't feel the need to do anything _else_ in there - then made her way down the hall toward the front of the house.

Since the back was where the bathroom and bedrooms were, it stood to reason that the kitchen - and the dining room, if this house even had one - would be toward the front of the house. Probably adjacent to the living room, the way her own would have been if not for the dining room separating them.

Swinging her arms and valiantly resisting the urge to sing more - Sora probably didn't do that, and Riku was suspicious enough as things stood now - Sarah made her way down the hall, in search of both a good breakfast and a way to unobtrusively study the layout of the house. This was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, after all. At least, she damn well _hoped _it was.

When she reached the front of the house, she found that it was indeed laid out just the way that she had supposed - or more like hoped - that it would be. The kitchen was on her right-hand side as she came down the hall, which just made things all the more strangely-familiar; all this place needed was a second story and a few more rooms, and it would be like a miniature version of her real house. She was glad it didn't have either.

"Sora," the average-looking woman; who reminded her of Shizu Onuma, at least what Shizu Onuma _would_ look like if her transformation into the quasi-Zoalord Griselda wasnt going to end up killing her before she reached even the earliest stages of what could be considered middle age, greeted her with a happy smile and a wave to a seat at the small, round table.

Her family's own table was large and rectangular, another difference that she was pleased to note as she sat down in the indicated chair.

"Riku told me that you were taking a shower this morning," she paused for a moment, clearly gathering her thoughts. "I've never known you to be so eager for a shower, Sora. You've always told me you liked baths better."

_Well, there's something you don't learn in-game,_ she mused. "Well, I didn't want to disturb too many people, but I'm not very fond of waking up all sweaty."

"You've never told me any of this, Sora," the woman said, looking relieved and a bit concerned at the same time.

Sarah didn't know her nearly well enough to hazard a guess about why.

"Well, I just didn't want to bother you with something I could take care of myself, that's all," she said, hoping that she sounded enough like Sora that his mother wouldn't suspect anything.

"I guess that makes sense," the woman said, smiling. "Still, I want you to remember to tell me if there's anything you need help with."

"Don't worry, Mom," she said, in spite of the fact that it felt really, _really_ weird to call the woman in front of her that. "I will."

The table was laid out with pancakes, eggs, and two pitchers each of milk and apple juice. Other than the apple juice, it was a lot like a family breakfast at her house; they would have been having orange juice, and there would have been a few more choices, though, so there were still enough differences between this place and her own house that she didnt feel like she had to constantly struggle with bouts of deja vu.

Riku was sitting at the table with them, and she wondered for a moment just why that was. Then, since she knew that there was no real chance of her ever finding out without blowing her cover and sounding out-of-character for Sora, she decided to forget the whole thing. The story behind it probably wasn't all that interesting, anyway.

Sora's mom served her and Riku before she took any food for herself, which was just one more difference between here and back home that she took note of. It was a nice way to remind herself that this place wasn't really her home. The food wasn't bad, either.

Once the meal had been finished, and she had found a way to thank Sora's mom for her hospitality that didn't make her sound like anything but the woman's son, she left to find a quiet place to update her journal.

"Hey Sora," Riku said, coming up from behind and to her right. "Did you forget that we're meeting up with Kairi to head to the islands today?"

"No." It was the plain truth; she _couldn't_ very well forget the events that had begun the first Kingdom Hearts game, even if she didnt know quite how far ahead of them she had arrived. "I was just going to get some sunblock."

"Why sunblock?"

"Well, we're going to be spending a lot of time out on the open sea," she said, in spite of the fact that she knew full well that she was spouting complete and total bullcrap. It was what Riku knew, so she had to work with that. "And, I don't know about you, but I'd just as soon avoid turning red as a boiled lobster after a few days on the raft."

"Oh," Riku blinked, and then he chuckled. "That's a good idea, Sora."

"Thanks," she said, smiling back. "Who knows," she continued, getting into the spirit of things a bit. "We might even end up getting a tan out there," she said, trying to forget for a moment that she knew what was coming.

Riku laughed. "I don't know, Sora. I can't really picture myself with a tan."

"Hmm," she said, putting her hand - Sora's hand, really, but whatever - to her chin in an exaggerated "thinking" pose. "You know, I think you're right. Someone with your hair-color wouldn't look very good with a tan."

They both had a good laugh at that pronouncement, and Riku grinned a bit wider.

"Don't take too long getting the sunblock, Sora, or I might just leave for the islands without you."

_And what a terrible tragedy _that_ would be_, she almost said. Still, despite all the time she'd spent playing the game and its sequels, she didn't really know Riku well enough to tease him yet. Besides, in the first game he definitely came off as pretty uptight.

"Don't worry, I won't take _too_ long," Riku, she said instead, with a smile. "I just need to ask." Not her mom; _her_ mom wasn't here. "Mom where the sunblock is, and I'll be ready."

She'd almost said that she'd be good to go, but since she'd never heard Sora use anything like that phrase in any of the games she'd played, she figured that _she_ shouldnt say those kinds of things in front of anyone who knew Sora. In that respect, she was almost looking forward to meeting up with Donald and Goofy: they didn't know Sora from Adam, so she could give up the pretense without worrying about being discovered.

Still, all of that was for later, and she didn't really like to think about the implications of actually _wanting _the world to explode faster; even if it wasn't her world, people still lived on it. She sure as hell wasn't going to _tell_ anyone what she was really thinking; it would be completely out of character for Sora, and it wouldn't exactly make _her_ look like a particularly good person, either.

Still, pretending to be a boy that she had never met - someone whose personality she had only gleaned bits and pieces of from in-game cutscenes - could quickly become taking. Sora seemed pretty much your Standard Disney Hero, only with Square Enix hair; she... wasn't that at all, and acting like it wasn't going to be easy. For one thing, there was her foreknowledge of in-game events, and on the other there was were complete _lack_ of knowledge of what Sora was like as a person. Couple that with her sarcasm, cynicism, habit of swearing when things got rough, and a few other things she hoped wouldn't become an issue, Sarah wasn't particularly looking forward to having to deal with Sora's friends.

Still, her acting skills _were_ pretty good, and she wouldn't have to maintain the ruse for anyone but Riku and Kairi. _Speaking of which... _She couldnt quite manage to suppress her amused smirk; it wasn't every day that one got the opportunity to mindfuck one of your more powerful - and certainly one of your most annoying - opponents, but Riku was already gone, so the point was probably moot anyway.

She _stopped_ being so amused, however, when she felt a familiar sensation in the lower half of her body. A particularly unpleasant, familiar sensation.

"_Fuck_," she hissed, lowly enough that it sounded more like a forceful exhalation than a word in and of itself.

She'd really been hoping to avoid this for a bit longer, but she supposed that bodily functions waited for no man. Or woman. Or woman-trapped-in-a-man's-body.

Grumbling a few more expletives in the three languages she spoke, Sarah headed back into the bathroom. This would be one hell of an unforgettable experience; no matter _how _much she tried to block it out. Reaching the bathroom, she let herself in and faced the toilet. While "she" prepared for what "she" was going to have to do, Sarah made it a point not to think too much about it.

Things were freaky enough for her as it was.

She was relying on procedural memory to get through the undressing part, but once she was down to the... er, bare essentials, she was forced to start paying more attention. Just out of sheer necessity; this wasn't something that procedural memory could carry her through, it was something she had never done before, something unprecedented in her life. Getting it over with as quickly as "she" could, Sarah went right over to the sink and started vigorously washing her hands. Repeating the process twice more, she let out a brief, heartfelt shudder.

_That_ hadn't been especially pleasant, but she knew even then that she was going to have to get used to it; it wasn't like she was being presented with a whole lot of viable alternatives.

"Sora?"

"I'm in the bathroom, Riku," she called through the door.

"Oh." She heard footsteps then, so she figured that he was coming closer. "Kairi's here, and I told her your idea about the sunblock. She thinks it's great."

"And, I also told him that _I _would get the sunblock, Sora," laughed a girl who could only be Kairi. "Since I knew that neither of _you_ two would remember it. Still," she laughed again. "I guess _you_ do have a good excuse for it. This time, at least," she concluded, obviously teasing.

Heading over to the door, Sarah opened it and stared for a few moments at the girl on the other side. _Ah, so that **is** where we are in the are in the timeline,_ she mused, with some satisfaction; she did so love being right.

"What are you looking at, Sora?"

Finding Kairi's face suddenly pressed up very close to her own, Sarah had to clamp down very hard on her first rabbit-punch-to-the-throat impulse.

"Hey, Kairi," "he" said instead, moving a reasonable distance from the other girl.

"Done in there already, Sora?" Kairi asked, grinning at her in what was clearly a teasing manner.

"Well, I actually still have to wash my hands," "he" said, still smiling.

"Well then, don't let _me_ distract you," Kairi replied, making little shooing motions. "Go finish up, while I go get the sunblock."

"Right, Kairi," "he" said, closing the door on the other girl's smile, while offering up yet another of her own.

Once she was isolated again, Sarah made her way back over to the sink, turned the water on for appearances, then quickly jotted down this new data, along with few speculations she was starting to have, into her journal. It may not have been her best penmanship, but at least she had her thoughts recorded for later.


	6. Journal Entry 2

_Okay, so I know a few more things now: one, this is clearly the first installment of the series; Kairi has short hair, no one's mentioned King Mickey, and Riku doesn't seem nearly as tense as he was after the whole "Ansem" fiasco. There's a chance that this could all be taking place inside Castle Oblivion, but I tend to doubt that._

_For one thing, Castle Oblivion has a much different layout than any of the locations in the first game; that's the PS2 version, of course. I'm not about to go out and blow who knows how many bucks on a Gameboy Advance just to play one measly game. Another big thing that makes me sure I'm on the real Destiny Islands - God help me, I can't believe I just wrote that - rather than the ones that Castle Oblivion created is the presence of Kairi, and a Riku that's not dressed up in "Ansem's" infamously hilarious hula dancer from hell getup._

_Still, what I'm actually going to be able to do about anything remains to be seen._


	7. Under his skin

_Chapter disclaimer: the song "Kyrie Eleison", sung by Mr. Mister, and "Treasure Sniper", sung by Totani Kimito, do not belong to me. Just like the worlds of Kingdom Hearts, Assassin's Creed, Prototype, or any of the X Vs. Capcom games._

XxX_  
_

When she had finished organizing her thoughts, pinning them to paper so that they couldn't slip away or shape-change on her, Sarah washed her hands for the final time. _At least until I end up having to pee again,_ she mused, with a put-upon sigh and a roll of "her" eyes. Flicking the excess water from her fingers twice, the way she had always done, Sarah grabbed the hand towel and dried them with her usual thoroughness.

Opening the door to find Riku still standing on the other side, she gave him the best "Sora smile" that she could muster. "Bathroom's all yours," she said.

He laughed. "Thanks, Sora. But that wasn't why I was waiting for you."

Before he could say anything else, though, Kairi came around the corner, saw them both together, and smiled widely.

"Good, you're done," she said, coming over to grab both "his" right hand and Riku's left. "I found the sunblock, and I thought, since we're all going to be spending the day out in the sun, we should put some on now so we don't get sunburn when we go out there today." Kairi turned back to look at "him". "I'm still surprised _you_ thought of this, Sora," she said to "him" over her shoulder.

Sarah gave the other girl an amused, whimsical smile. "Just because I don't usually plan ahead doesn't mean I _can't_," she said, with what she hoped was a convincing tone.

Something indefinable passed over Kairi's face, but it was gone before Sarah could make any sense of it.

"I guess you're right," Kairi said at last, something Sarah couldn't define still lingering in her eyes.

It was almost as if she was starting to have suspicions, but she was doing her best to suppress them; clearly, Sarah needed to work on her acting. They arrived back in the kitchen then, and Kairi headed over to the table while Riku stopped and pulled out one of the chairs to sit down. After taking a moment to gauge Kairi's reaction, something she was fairly but not entirely sure that the other girl hadn't noticed, Sarah settled herself down in a chair right beside the one that Riku was using

When Kairi picked up the bottle of sunblock, or suntan lotion or whatever you preferred to call it, she waited and watched as the younger girl slathered on the lotion and rubbed it into her skin; all the while trying not to think of any lines from "Silence of the Lambs". She hadn't even _seen_ the movie, but enough of the quotes had reached memetic status on the Internet that she could recite them from memory if she wanted to. Here and now, though, wasn't the time or the place for that kind of thing. Besides the fact that she hadn't yet seen evidence of any electronics more complicated than a light bulb, Sarah wasn't about to do something so blatantly out-of-character for Sora as to start spouting quotes from horror movies that neither of them had seen.

When the three of them had finished putting the sunblock on all of the parts of their skin that would be exposed while they were all playing on the beach together – and hopefully not getting into a fight with any psychotic Radam Tekkamen – she mused, with a quickly-smothered smirk, Riku was the first out of his seat.

"Well, now that none of us are going to be getting sunburned, let's get going." The silver-haired boy shot her a look, and Sarah resisted the urge to either smirk or roll her eyes at him; wasn't likely to be something Sora would do, and she'd acted unlike Sora enough that she suspected Kairi might have noticed, so she was trying to act as honestly Sora-like as she knew how.

She couldn't really gauge her own effectiveness, however, since that would involve paying more strict attention to Kairi's reactions, and _that_ was as likely to give her away as anything. So Sarah just tried to stay as aware of her own reactions as she could, matching them as closely to what she knew of Sora's as was possible. They soon left the house, heading out the back door and down to the beach.

It wasn't the place where she'd first landed on this world, but it _was_ clearly an important place in the grand scheme of things. The three boats bobbing gently in the current made it obvious that this was the first step on their trip to Destiny Islands, and the first step on the long, winding road that would end at the gates of Kingdom Hearts. And, preferably with her finding a way to get back home.

"Geeze, Sora, are you singing _again_?"

Riku's sudden, incredulous query startled Sarah back to the present moment, reminding her of just where she was; and who she was pretending to be.

"I think it was a nice song," Kairi said, and turned to face "Sora" more squarely. "Do you think you could sing it again?"

"Well..." _Blistering Hellfreid,_ she groused inwardly, gently shoving the unattended middle boat into the surf. _At least it wasn't J-pop or something like that,_ she mused, hiding a small smile by tilting her head just that much farther down; the other two probably thought she was just looking down at her boat, or rather that "he" was. "All right, Kairi. If you really want me to."

Given the fact that she'd pretty much memorized the song in question, along with a few dozen others and snatches of not-even-she-knew how many more, that wasn't such a tall order. Calling up the melody in her memory, Sarah allowed herself to smile just a bit. This might not have been something that Sora would do, and yeah there were probably going to be consequences for this little indulgence of hers, but this was something harmless that she enjoyed doing.

And, who knew; maybe the consequences wouldn't be all that bad.

"The wind blows hard against this mountainside," she sang, pushing Sora's boat out into the surf to launch it. "Across the sea into my soul."

Holding the last note for a moment, Sarah settled herself into the gently-rocking boat, taking a deep breath as she tried to find a comfortable rhythm for rowing. Finding it, she continued: "It reaches in to where I cannot hide, setting my feet upon the road."

This might not have been her native world, and might in fact have been the last place in the 'verse she had ever expected to end up, but she was here now, so she was going to try to make what differences she could. "My heart is old, it holds my memories; my body burns a gemlike flame."

Sarah wondered for a moment just what was going to happen two or three days hence, when this world that they were all standing on was consumed by some freakish, giant space anomaly, but then she decided not to stress herself out about it. Whatever happened would happen, and worrying about it would only make her more jumpy and prone to overreaction; not a good thing when she was at least _trying_ to maintain a passable cover-story. "Somewhere between the soul and soft machine, is where I find myself again."

It was kind of strange, Sarah reflected; she didn't know much about rowing aside from what she'd seen on TV, but she seemed to be doing pretty well here and now. Then again, she _was_ in Sora's body, so it was probably Sora's muscle-memory at work. "Kyrie Eleison, down the road that I must travel. Kyrie Eleison, through the darkness of the night. Kyrie Eleison, where I'm going will you follow? Kyrie Eleison, on a highway in the night."

Sarah wondered when they were going to reach those small islands that the first game began on; the game itself gave no indication of travel-time to or from their meeting place. _That's the trouble with games like this,_ she groused, with a mental roll of her eyes. _No one ever thinks about what could happen if it became real._

"When I was young, I thought of growing old. Of what my life would mean to me." Sarah almost had to laugh at herself for that thought: the reason that no one thought about any kind of game becoming real was that it never happened; except, ironically enough, in certain types of RPGs.

"Would I have followed down my chosen road, or only wished what I could be?" Sarah wished for a moment that she could ask how long their journey was going to take without the risk of compromising her cover, if not blowing it entirely. Sure "Kyrie Eleison" wasn't the longest song that she could have chosen to sing, and in fact it was nearly all over but the chorus, but she would have liked to know how much time she had before they all arrived at their intended destination.

"Kyrie Eleison, down the road that I must travel. Kyrie Eleison, through the darkness of the night. Kyrie Eleison, where I'm going, will you follow? Kyrie Eleison, down a highway in the night." As she continued to row, breathing deeply between each stroke so that she could maintain a steady rhythm, Sarah caught her first glimpse of the Destiny Islands. It looked like they were only a few more minutes out. that was good, since she only needed a few more minutes to finish the song, in any case.

"Kyrie Eleison, down the road that I must travel. Kyrie Eleison, through the darkness of the night. Kyrie Eleison, where I'm going, will you follow? Kyrie Eleison, down a highway in the night." She hadn't heard Kairi singing along during her last repetition of the chorus, or maybe she just hadn't been paying enough attention to notice that she had, but in any case the two of them were coming to the end of their impromptu duet.

The three of them were closing in on the main island, and Sarah thought that she would have just enough time to finish the song before they all reached the shore.

"Kyrie Eleison, down the road that I must travel. Kyrie Eleison, through the darkness of the night. Kyrie Eleison, where I'm going, will you follow? Kyrie Eleison, down a highway in the night."

As her and Riku's boats bumped gently against each other while she continued to guide Sora's boat up to the dock, Sarah breathed deeply to steady herself. For a few seconds Sarah wondered if she was supposed to lash the boat to something, or tie it up somehow. She'd never seen anything like that in the game itself, but then the boats in the game had been nothing but one more piece of pre-rendered scenery in a game full of the stuff.

"I never knew you could sing so well, Sora," Riku said, as he carefully climbed out of his boat and up onto the dock.

"Well, I'm just full of surprises," she said, concentrating more on getting up and out of Sora's boat than anything else.

This was something that she had never done before, and she didn't want to screw something up because she hadn't been paying attention. When she had made it up onto the dock that bordered the water, thankfully _without_ falling in, Sarah took a moment to discreetly take in both her new surroundings and the people around her. Kairi was giving her that unreadable look again; something Sarah didn't yet have enough personal experience to interpret yet.

She was probably going to end up getting just that kind of personal experience before this whole debacle was over with, but for now she was pretty much flying blind.

"You're not just going to _stand_ there all day, are you, Sora?" Kairi asked, once again standing a bit closer than Sarah was really comfortable with.

Not that she didn't like Kairi or anything, since given she'd seen in-game and everything she was seeing now it was pretty obvious that she was the kind of genuinely nice person that Sarah hanging around so much, but having anyone standing so close to her made Sarah feel like she was boxed in; it made her feel like she couldn't breathe if it went on for too long, though she usually tended to lash out before it got _that_ far. She didn't know if Sora had the same kind of issues with crowding as she did, but given all the things she had seen him put up with in-game, she was personally inclined to doubt it.

"Sorry," she said, working a cheerful expression for the two of them. "I guess I just got a little lost in thought back there."

"Well, I'm glad you managed to find your way back, then," Kairi said, with a small but clearly amused smile.

From all that she had seen of Kairi in-game, Sarah had formed the impression of someone who was brave, kind, loyal, decent, and gentle. Sure, the cutscenes _had_ hinted that she had least the beginnings of a sense of humor, but Sarah hadn't really gotten to know the other girl very well; what with the planet exploding and the Heartless attacking and all, but Sarah was starting to understand just why Sora liked her so much.

Really, the only people who didn't seem to like her were the rabid Riku x Sora 'shippers, and anyone with half a brain knew that rabid 'shippers of any stripe were hopeless morons in desperate need of a reality-check. Of course, it wasn't like rabid anti-shippers were any better; really, anyone who took the love-lives of fictional characters so seriously that they were willing to fight about it really needed to look into getting a life.

As she followed Kairi and Riku out onto the shore of the largest of the Destiny Islands for the first time, Sarah considered what her first order of business was going to be. She already knew how Sora had done things, and she wasn't particularly interested in repeating Sora's actions completely during however long she was going to be stuck here, so Sarah decided that she might as well begin taking some initiative now as later.

"Where are _you_ going off to, Sora?"

She smiled. "Well, we still need to get the rest of the parts for the raft, don't we?"

"So what, are you trying to tell me that you've actually developed a _work ethic_ now?" Riku asked, giving her a sidelong grin.

"I know, shocking isn't it?" she returned with a smirk.

Riku looked like someone had just taken a swing at him, or else like he'd face-planted into a wall. It was really pretty funny, but she knew better than to laugh. That wouldn't be like Sora at all.

No one else said anything, and the three of them made their way onto the Destiny Islands. She figured that, since Riku and Kairi already knew what "Sora" was planning to do, she might as well go and do it. Besides, checking her reactions again might make Kairi suspicious, or at least more suspicious than she might already be.

Taking a moment to recall just where all of that stuff they had wanted actually was, Sarah let a brief smile cross "her" face when Kairi spoke up.

"Remember, Sora: we need two logs, a rope, and some cloth to finish our raft!"

"Thanks, Kairi," she said, with a slightly wider smile.

Having remembered at last where the three targets of her now-self-appointed fetch-quest actually _were_, decided that since she didn't actually _want_ to be hauling logs all over the place – gameplay mechanics had made this job so much easier – she would go for the lighter and more easily portable objects first. That in mind, she made her way to the ladder that she had used so many times and yet never used at all. It had been a long time since she had played any of the games in the Kingdom Hearts series, and also awhile since she had watched the Hellfire Commentaries playthrough of the first game, but things were starting to come back to her the more time she spent retracing Sora's in-game steps.

Probably just like riding a bike, she figured.

Passing around the curved, wooden wall that wrapped around the large rock – really more of a giant boulder, or a small, rocky hill – she continued on her way to the comparatively large wooden platform where she and all of the other gamers had met up with KH!Tidus. briefly, she wondered if Spoony would hate KH!Tidus as much as he hated FF!Tidus; probably not, though, both since you didn't spend nearly as much time with KH!Tidus as you did with the FF variant, and because you had the opportunity to beat the ever-loving crap out of him pretty much at whim.

When she finally made it to the platform, though it was really more like someone's deck sans the awning now that she thought about it, Sarah found that KH!Tidus was _not_ in fact making those ridiculous swinging motions with that stick he used as a mêlée-weapon. At least, he wasn't making them constantly, to the point where he resembled a fisherman on crack; she supposed it came of not being an NPC with limited AT anymore.

"Hey Sora, you feel lucky today?"

_And yet he's _still _as predictable as ever,_ she mused, holding back a smirk through sheer force of will; she'd never known Sora to smirk, so she knew that she couldn't do it around anyone who knew him. At least, not if she didn't want to risk freaking them out and possibly blowing her cover. She could probably smirk all she wanted to around Riku, though.

"I think I'll have to get back to you about that," she said, picking up the coil of rope and settling it over her neck and left shoulder, leaving her right arm with the freedom of movement she was going to need if she was going to get the rest of this fetch-quest done.

"Kairi's putting you to work already, huh?" Tidus asked, laughing.

"Yeah, she's a real slave-driver," Sarah said, before she could stop herself.

Luckily for her, all Tidus did in response to _that_ little quip was to laugh a bit harder. Sarah knew that she really had to break her habit of making those sarcastic little asides, at least while she was on this island with so many people who knew Sora to some greater or lesser degree.

Another reason to look forward to meeting Donald and Goofy: she wouldn't have to live up to anyone else's preconceived notions. For the moment, however, she would have to watch her reactions a lot more carefully if she was going to make it to the end of the world without being caught out.

"See you later, Sora!" Tidus called out, once Sarah had finished getting the rope settled over her shoulder and hence started to move out.

"Yeah, later, Tidus," she called back over her own shoulder with a smile, taking care to pronounce the name the way that KH!Wakka had.

She'd always pronounced it 'tide-us' rather than 'teed-us', but she figured that now wasn't really the time for changing things like that up; she'd be doing plenty of that once she made it off-world. Since the kid himself didn't correct her pronunciation, Sarah figured she had gotten it right, so she didn't break stride as she made her way back down to ground-level. By the time she'd made it to the bottom of the ladder, the rope she was carrying had begun to chafe her neck.

Removing it with a soft, relived sigh, she set the still-coiled rope down by the small, artificial pond that sat near the Seaside Shack. _Wonder if I'll find that Save Point,_ she mused, laughing softly at her own whimsy. Like she was going to walk in there and find a circle of pulsing, rippling green-and-white light, one that was large enough for her to stand in and would heal all her wounds if she did so. Not that she actually _had_ any wounds at the moment, but it was the principle of the thing.

However, for the moment, she had more important things to do than look for something that probably wasn't even there in the first place.

Making her way past the coil of rope she'd already lay down, Sarah climbed up the second plank-bridge and make her way over to the short ladder. Climbing _that_, she made her way over to the comparatively small, hollowed-out space next to the rocky hill; she wondered for a moment just who had built it and what it had been used for, but then she decided to shelve her curiosity since there wasn't much chance of her getting an answer before the whole world-shattering-kaboom bit, and by then she would have more important things to think about. Besides, it was probably just a clubhouse or something.

As she folded up the cloth that had been hanging on the wall to make it easier to carry, Sarah thought fondly of the way that these kinds of things would vanish into her inventory with no more than a simple touch; no doubt about it, game-mechanics had made these annoying fetch-quests a hell of a lot easier.

Of course, that meant that carrying all the Hi-Potions and Ethers she was going to want when she made it into Traverse Town and the KH'Verse in general was going to be a bitch and a half.

Still, all of those considerations could be addressed later, when she actually had some time to herself. For the moment, she had a fetch-quest to complete, and some sparring to get in if she was going to keep people from becoming suspicious of her. She also had a date to curb-stomp Riku, but business before pleasure; smirking faintly, she set the folded cloth down on top of the rope and turned away to head for the beach. Realizing that she had begun to sing "Treasure Sniper" under her breath, Sarah clicked her teeth together in annoyance and sighed.

She really needed to stop doing things that were so out-of-character for Sora; it was bound to get her in trouble sooner or later. She couldn't afford to let herself get caught up in the moment, or else she was likely to end up giving herself away without meaning to, and perhaps even without noticing at first. Of course, all of those were probably good reasons for her to _avoid_ fighting Riku, since she and Sora not only had wildly divergent fighting-styles, but she tended to get a little over-enthusiastic when she was in the heat of battle. There was a chance that Riku, even as unobservant as he was, would notice something off about "Sora" if they sparred.

On the other hand, since it _was_ just going to be a spar as opposed to a real fight, Sarah wouldn't be using the same kinds of moves that she'd have been breaking out if she'd _honestly _been trying to beat Riku into submission. So it wasn't that likely that she would end up hurting him _too_ much. Besides, it wasn't like Riku took too much notice of what was going on around him; hell, the only thing that was likely to come of her pounding him into submission was that he'd be a little more pissy when Maleficent got her hooks into him, and given the fact that she was going to kick his ass at Hollow Bastion anyway, that probably didn't matter.

With the first of the two logs she needed tucked under her left arm, Sarah made her way back to the growing pile where she had stashed the rest of the materials she had gathered thus far. Dropping the log off with a dull 'thunk', Sarah continued on her way past the shack and up to the plank-bridge that connected the relatively dinky main island with the speck-of-a-barely-larger-than-an-MMA-arena island that Riku was standing on. Well, lounging on really, since she'd seen him on that tree during that post-or-during-fetch-quest-cutscene that she had triggered when she'd made her way out to said itty-bitty island in the game. Still, the fact that she had switched up the order of the events that she had gone through before those many times in-game just might mean that she _wouldn't _find Riku lounging around on that tree; she remembered game-Riku saying that he had already delivered all the stuff he'd been asked to gather up to game-Kairi, but that was _after_ game-Sora had been caught napping by both the latter and the former.

Without that, there was a definite possibility that Riku was still out there gathering whatever miscellaneous items Kairi had sent him out to get. She suspected that one or more of them might have been logs, just like Sora himself had been asked to get. It fit with what she'd seen during the opening cutscene of the game, the one that she had probably thoroughly FUBARed by now.

She wondered briefly just what it was that Riku had been asked to get, then decided to shelve her curiosity since she knew that it was never going to be satisfied. True, she could ask, but Riku would probably make fun of "him" for it, and then he wouldn't tell her anyway. Best not to bring it up in the first place, she decided.

The sound of shoes scuffling across sand let Sarah know that she wasn't alone on the small island, so she glanced over "her" shoulder to see who it was.

"Oh, hey Riku?" she said, flashing the silver-haired boy a brief smile before turning back to her work.

She'd just spotted the last of the logs that Sora had been sent to fetch, and she wasn't about to let herself be distracted. Riku's footsteps paused for a moment, while she continued on her way over to the log that she that she had spotted when she'd first onto this island; or really, when she had first played the game that this island was a part of. Riku's footsteps started back up when she'd almost gotten to the log, and as she picked the thing up, Sarah turned to look over "her" left shoulder.

"You want to talk, Riku?" she asked, taking a shot in the dark, even as she hefted the last log up under that same arm.

"How did you know it was me, Sora?" the sliver-haired boy asked, sounding surprised enough that Sarah almost wanted to laugh.

That wouldn't have been very Sora-like, so she restrained herself. Turning around so that she wouldn't get neck-cramps from trying to have a conversation with someone who was standing behind her, Sarah couldn't resist the urge to smile, just a bit.

"Well, I didn't think Kairi would be coming over to collect this stuff personally," she said, still wearing a slight smile. "She seemed kind of busy."

"That wasn't what I was talking about, Sora," Riku said, folding his arms and looking more closely at "him". "How did you know I was coming at all? I didn't _say_ anything."

Hiding her chuckle by coughing into her fist, Sarah quickly wiped the smile off Sora's face when Riku peered more closely at "him".

"Well, are you going to tell me, or not?" the boy asked, getting in just a bit closer than Sarah was truly comfortable with.

_First off, get out of my face,_ Sarah didn't say, moving back slightly, even as she tucked the log more securely under "her" left arm and prepared to move out. "Walk with me a bit, and I'll show you," she said, looking back over "her" shoulder at Riku again.

"All right," the boy in question said, though he looked a bit dubious.

The two of them made their way off the small island in silence, but that only lasted for the first few steps before Riku decided that he'd had enough.

"I don't get what I'm supposed to be seeing her, Sora," he said impatiently.

"You're not supposed to be _seeing_ anything, Riku," she returned easily, as the two of them continued on their way off the small island.

"You're not making any sense," he said, sounding all the more irritated by what she had just said.

_Well, at least I know he wasn't just being dense for story-purposes,_ she mused, with a soft sigh. "It's not something you're going to figure out just by watching what I do, Riku," she said, looking back over "her" shoulder at him.

"What do you mean by _that_? You're _still_ not making any sense, Sora!"

"Shh," she said, hushing him with her right hand. "Just listen."

Pacing a circle around Riku, Sarah shifted the log in her grip to relieve some of the strain on her left arm.

"You _heard_ me coming?" Riku blinked, staring incredulously down at her feet as Sarah returned to her starting point.

She chuckled. "Never disregard input from any of your senses, Riku. It's always something you _don't_ notice that gets you."

With that minor bit of hard-earned wisdom imparted, and Riku looking like someone had just slapped him with a wet fish, Sarah made her way across the wood-plank bridge and back onto the main island. Riku followed silently, and as she reviewed her performance from the last few minutes, Sarah cursed herself silently.

_Just couldn't resist the urge to show off, now could you? Fucking moron; the hell are you going to do if they find you out? Of course, the rate _you're _going, it's not going to be a matter of _if _so much as a matter of _when_, now isn't it?_ Tossing the last log to the ground with a bit more force than was perhaps strictly necessary, Sarah exhaled soundlessly. She really needed to remember to stop doing things that could compromise her cover.

No matter how natural she found it to be able to pick out the sound of footsteps approaching her, she had to remember not to chide the person who had been trying to sneak up on her for their absolute lack of anything resembling stealth training. Not everyone had a Dad with friends in Special Forces and the Navy SEALs, after all. She was pretty sure that no one _here_ did, at least.

Hell, she didn't know if anyone here knew what armed forces _were_, let alone had any of them.

A punch to her right shoulder startled Sarah out of her contemplation, and she quickly bent her legs slightly, preparing to dodge the next blow while her hands came up to throw her own punches. Or just to throw her opponent so that she would be able to beat them down more easily.

"Geeze, Sora," Riku said, laughing as his eyes roved to take in her stance. "You'd think you wanted to fight right here and now." He subsided a bit, but he was still smirking. "Tell you what: you get all of that stuff delivered to Kairi, then come meet me out on the island. And, when I win, you can teach me how to do that trick you just did." Riku was smirking by the end of his little speech, and even with the fact that her reaction – both of them, really – would have given her away to a more observant person, Sarah still had to bite back the answering smirk that wanted to spread across her own face.

This was why she enjoyed dealing with Riku: he was dense enough not to take any notice of the ways she was acting different than Sora.

"And what happens if _I_ win?" she asked, cocking her head slightly.

Normally, if some arrogant pinhead like Riku so obviously was challenged her to a fight, she'd mock them a bit in her counter-challenge, and then laugh at the look on their face. Then, of course, she would proceed to kick their asses ten ways from next Sunday using her no-holds-barred-everything-is-permitted fighting style.

Probably while taunting them, depending on their level of combat experience compared to her.

Still, as things stood now, she wasn't as confident as she usually was. There were two major reasons for that, the first being that Sora's body didn't have any of the ingrained muscle-memory or flexibility that she had trained into her own. Sure, she knew from experience that Sora had his own set of muscle-memories, but she didn't know if any of them related to combat. Really, from what she'd seen in-game, Sora seemed to be more of a brawler than anything; at least, he showed no _evidence_ of formal combat training in the first game.

She didn't quite remember the second or third games well enough to comment on the evolution of Sora's skills, and she hadn't played many of the later games, either because they hadn't come out for the PS2 or PS3 yet, or because she hadn't gotten to that point in the story yet. In fact, she reflected with a bit of morbid amusement, she hadn't even finished Riku's story in the second game.

Laughing softly to herself, Sarah hefted the coiled rope and settled it over her neck and left shoulder.

She'd stopped halfway through Riku's story in Re: Chain of Memories because she'd been fed up with all of the level-grinding she'd had to do to keep from getting killed by the various bosses in that game. And then Tatsunoko vs. Capcom had come out, followed closely by Kamen Rider Dragon Knight the game. Then, when she had just started to get tired of those games – not an easy prospect when there was a new ending to see for each character in both games – the PS3 system had come out, along with a new library of games. Foremost among them, at least in her mind, had been Assassin's Creed and not long after that Assassin's Creed II.

In fact, the only reason that she'd started playing the first Kingdom Hearts game again at all was the fact that she had never managed to create Ultima Weapon from her visits to the Moogles' item workshop.

Of course, under the circumstances she could see how it might have been a _good_ thing that she'd loaded up this particular game at this particular time. If she'd ended up falling into Tatsunoko vs. Capcom, _Marvel_ vs. Capcom, either of the Assassin's Creed games she owned, or even – God forbid – _Prototype_... Well, she'd have a hell of a time getting back out again.

With the cloth now safely tucked under Sora's left arm, Sarah made her way past the old shack that might or might not have a save-point in it, past the bridge on the other side that lead to the islet/arena-where-she-might-or-might-not-kick-Riku's-ass, and over to the large wooden gate that she had always found Kairi in front of during this particular fetch-quest. Sure enough, there she stood; she even waved as "he" came striding up.

"I'm glad to see you're taking this so seriously now, Sora," the other girl said, with a teasing giggle. "Now, all you have left to get are the last two logs."

"On it," Sarah said, resisting the urge to snap off a casual sort of salute. "I'll be right back."

As she turned and made to leave, Sarah could almost _feel_ Kairi's scrutiny on her. She wondered for a moment just what that could mean, but then she decided that it probably wasn't that important. Even if Kairi _had_ started to take note of the inevitable discrepancies between her behavior and Sora's – which was pretty much a given since she wasn't nearly as dense as Riku – most people would just figure that someone was having an off-day, or just showing a new side of themselves. Depending on the circumstances involved.

It took a certain kind of person to add two plus two and come up with twenty-two, after all.

Hefting the logs up under both of Sora's arms, Sarah paused for a moment as she felt yet another set of eyes resting on her. She knew who they belonged to, of course, but she was at least mildly curious to know what it was he wanted.

"Glad to see you're almost finished, Sora," Riku said, a cocky smirk spreading over the lower half of his face. "That means you can teach me whatever it was that you just did to find me out back there."

He sounded like he thought he'd already won, like the fight he'd challenged her to was a mere formality; like someone who thought all he had to do to win was just show up. He had no idea who he was dealing with. Sure, she might not have the strength, stamina, or muscle-memory that she had spent so long training herself to have, but that really only mattered for the more complicated or "showy" moves in her repertoire.

She was still perfectly capable of striking at weak-points, kicking people in inconvenient or extremely unpleasant places, throwing someone's ass all over the place, or paralyzing an opponent with strikes directly to the nerves or pressure-points. Riku was looking a bit uneasy now, and since Sarah could still feel her "your ass is mine now, bitch" smile stretching Sora's lips, she knew just why that was.

"Looking forward to it," was all she said, turning her attention back to the path she had to travel and continuing on her way.

Now that she'd made her resolution to pound Riku into the sand and grind her bootheels into the back of his skull, even if only in a metaphorical sense, Sarah almost felt like whistling.

The only way she'd been able to beat Riku on Destiny Islands was to do a fair bit of level-grinding beforehand, and that had been on her _second_ playthrough; the people at Hellfire Commentaries had never managed to do that, but then NTom64 hadn't done and level-grinding during the previous part of their own playthrough, and The Helldragon had stated later that he didn't bother with level-grinding at all. She thought that it was kind of interesting, how someone didn't bother with something that felt like an essential part of her gaming experience, but then not a lot of people were completionests to the same degree that she was.

And, not everyone enjoyed curb-stomping their opponents into the ground, either.

Meeting up with Kairi again, Sarah smiled as she turned over the logs that she had gathered to the other girl. She didn't get anything for it, but then she hadn't been expecting to; that Hi-Potion that Kairi had somehow managed to get her hands on had just been a game mechanic, the same way that Riku had been able to hold a nigh-infinite amount of Potions in those stupid-looking parachute-pants of his. Just something to make completing a fetch-quest or beating the crap out of an idiot that much more rewarding.

Leaving Kairi behind, with only a few words of thanks from the other girl, as well as a reminder that the three of them would be setting sail tomorrow, Sarah went off in search of Riku. She'd already made up her mind to kick his ass by any means possible, that she didn't have to worry so much about her cover since Riku was both dense enough not to notice something that was right in front of him – witness his being so willing to trust Maleficent – and he also had the worst case of tunnel-vision that she had ever seen in anyone, video game character or not.

So, he wasn't likely to notice that she was using moves that Sora never had, or if he did, he was likely to be too angry to consider the full implications of his "old friend's" new fighting-style. She'd have to watch the trash-talk a bit more than she usually bothered to, however, if she didn't end up having to cut it out entirely depending on the intensity of the fight. She couldn't say anything too vulgar or perverse, or make any disparaging comments about Riku's mother, or threaten him with sudden and/or violent dismemberment, disfigurement, or death or death during the course of their fight; even someone with _his_ kind of tunnel-vision could still notice when someone he'd known for as long as he was implied to have known Sora was being uncharacteristically aggressive, after all.

It would have been really annoying to be found out by someone with the degree of tunnel-vision displayed by first-game Riku, as well, so she would still have to be on her guard to some degree.

Making her way back over to the bridge, "Her" arms free at last of the burdens that she had been carrying, Sarah took a deep breath and let it out slowly as she crossed over to the small islet/arena where she and Riku were going to have it out. Swinging "her" arms and walking a bit more loosely than she usually did, both to limber herself up for combat and to get what little extra experience she could with the way Sora moved, Sarah made it out to the islet where Riku was waiting.

"I was starting to think that you weren't going to show up," the silver-haired – and damn if that wasn't as weird to think of as it was to see – said with a smirk, obviously goading.

She smirked right back. "Oh, I wouldn't miss _this_ for the world."

Riku looked thrown for a few moments, obviously not having expected that kind of a response; he regained his mental footing pretty quickly, though. Sarah was almost impressed.

"I found your sword, too," he said, with that same tone he'd used before. "Really careless of you, to leave it lying around the way you did."

It was almost cute, the way he was trying so hard to get a rise out of her; like a poodle yapping at a tank: amusing in its futility.

"Who says I need a sword to beat _you_?"

That wiped the smirk right off his face, but more than that, it seemed to make him _angry_. And, as she had always told her opponents after she had finished beating them down: you never wanted to let your adversary make you angry. If you let _that_ happen, after all, you'd lost the fight even before the first punch was thrown.

She kind of wondered if _Riku_ was going to get the lesson before or after she had pummeled him about the head and shoulders a few times. She supposed that now was as good a time as ever to find that out.

"You know, we could stand here exchanging witty banter all day," she said, just as Riku had opened his mouth to try flinging another barb her way. "Or, I could just pummel you into the sand and the two of us could get on with our lives." Oh, he _really_ didn't like that one; this was going to be _fun_.

Catching the wooden sword he threw at her, Sarah side-stepped his head-long charge and stuck out "her" left leg to trip him in passing. Sprawled out on the sand, almost flat on his belly, the look Riku gave her was pure, incredulous fury.

She smirked, leaning in, but only slightly so she wouldn't run the risk of being grabbed and pummeled herself; remote as it admittedly was. "Well, that was predictable. You have anything new to show me, or should we just call this fight right here, right now?"

He _really_ didn't like that one; back-stepping to get herself out of range of his swipes, Sarah began to observe his style of attack. She wanted to see if there were any weaknesses that she could exploit, or a pattern that she would be able to predict after some strict observation. Naturally, Riku – impatient and inexperienced with real combat as he was – took her actions entirely out of context.

"Don't tell me you're giving up already, Sora!"

He let his guard down for those few, crucial moments. And then he folded up very nicely around the tip of the wooded sword that she rammed into his stomach. He also made the most interesting _aghngh_ sound when he did; Sarah almost had to laugh.

There was something she was supposed to be remembering about that, though; she was having a bit too much fun to recall whatever-it-was properly at the moment, but for some reason Sarah thought that she should go a bit easier on the in-combat taunting. There was also a reason that she shouldn't just burst out singing "Treasure Sniper" during the lulls of something that could only be charitably called combat, but that was a matter for another time.

"You know, if this had been live steel we were fighting with right now, I'd have probably either just disemboweled you, or even mortally wounded you right there," she said, smirking slightly at the expression of pure and utter "what the _fuck_?" spreading across Riku's still slightly-rounded face. Her smirk widened slightly as she tapped him lightly on the neck with what might have charitably been called the edge of her wooden sword. "And now you're dead."

"Wha- what was _that_, Sora?" Riku demanded.

"I'm sorry, you just left this big, huge opening that seemed to scream "attack"," she said glibly.

"What?" he demanded again, climbing back to his feet with his left hand over his stomach.

He was still stuck on that; he must have been slow.

"You let your guard down." Speaking more slowly and clearly, both so he could at least _try_ to get what she was saying, and because it really seemed to piss him off. "That's really not a good idea there, sport."

Riku's face twisted in something resembling the closest that whiney, emo dumbass could get to anger. He was probably going for some kind of intimidation or something like that, but given the fact that she had already floored him once, and the fact that he was almost aggressively stupid during the first game, the attempt fell flat almost immediately.

"What's that look on your face?" she asked, smirking slightly. "You trying not to sneeze, or something?"

That got his attention, prompting Riku to charge recklessly at her, his wooden sword held high over his head as if he intended to give her a _severe_ thwacking with it. Stepping calmly out of his path, Sarah grabbed Riku's sword-less arm and assisted his forward- momentum, right into the sand. Riku came up spluttering – Sarah wondered for a moment if he'd gotten sand in his mouth or if he was just _that_ shocked – and Sarah's smirk widened ever-so-slightly. Carefully, making sure that he was still watching what she was doing, Sarah stuck the wooden sword she'd been given point-down into the sand, making sure to drive it deep enough that it would stand on its own when she left it there. Then, just to make sure that Riku didn't get any absurd ideas about her giving up or something stupid like that, she made a "bring it on" gesture with her previously-occupied hand.

Riku took the bait, just like she'd always known he would, and charged at her again, sword swinging in a manner that would have been dangerous if he'd been wielding live steel. One would have thought that he'd have learned better after experiencing the results of his last two attempts, but one look at his face told Sarah everything she needed to know: Riku was clearly too angry to think straight at this point.

Crouching as Riku came within striking-distance of "her" head and shoulders, she put the full weight and strength of Sora's body behind a rising-uppercut right into Riku's gut. The silver-haired boy stumbled backwards, wooden sword falling from his nerveless fingers as he clutched at his stomach.

"Watch your _footing_," she taunted, crouching again to deliver a powerful sweep-kick that sent Riku crashing to the ground on his side.

Rising back to her feet, Sarah bounced lightly on the balls of said feet a few times, both to loosen herself up a bit more – it was never a good idea to be tense when you were fighting – and to taunt Riku as he lay there staring up at her from his latest harsh encounter with the sand. Riku took the bait almost immediately – honestly, it was almost embarrassing how easily-predictable he was getting; still funny as hell, though – grabbing his sword and charging at her with the kind of reckless abandon that she hadn't seen in anyone since she had encountered her last strike-team as Alex Mercer. Looking back over her shoulder to judge the distance, she smirked slightly when she saw that she was in almost the perfect place to serve her current needs. Side-stepping out of the way of Riku's headlong assault on her person, she grabbed his sword-arm before he could overshoot her position, assisting his forward-momentum with a brief, almost involuntary "Hyah!"

_Cue the "yaahh- ker-splash",_ she mused with genuine amusement, as Riku fell into the ocean with a brief scream. Walking out to the edge of the small islet, knowing that Riku wouldn't be able to climb back up without the aid of the ladder and the sand-bar he was currently in the wrong position to access, Sarah smiled cheerfully down at him.

"I do believe I just won that round."

Riku, after a few, long moments spent seething impotently up at her – moments during which she waved happily down to him – swam for the ladder, and the sand-bar that would allow him to access it. Moving back to the center of the islet, knowing that Riku would be all too happy to push her off, or even pull her off, if she gave him half the chance, Sarah smirked as Riku made his dripping way back over to where she stood waiting for him.

"You're not going to do that again, Sora," he said, his teeth gritting fury and a harsh glare on his face.

She smiled, bland and mocking. "Of _course_ not; I never use the same moves twice in a row."

Well, at least not if her opponent was smart enough to at least begin to anticipate her moves and hence to develop a strategy to counter them. Still, Riku seemed to be doing just that; at the very least, he hadn't yet charged headlong into yet another throw. Maybe being dumped into the drink had managed to cool his metaphorical heels.

Riku was staring at her now, or at least the boy he still thought she was, and he continued to do so even as she slowly paced a circle around him, assessing his stance and his state of readiness the same way she could remember every one of her combat-instructors doing. It wasn't much of a stance, really; Riku just looked tense, as if he was waiting for some new kind of attack to be used against him.

Experimentally, Sarah took a swing at him. The result was pretty much immediate: Riku jumped back, crouched slightly to give himself some much-needed stability, and jabbed at her with his right fist. She dodged of course, moving out of the range of his fists with the same smooth, quick motions that she had used when attacking, but the reaction in itself was still something to see.

"Innovation, from you," she said contemplatively, looking him over once again; she noticed that his sword was missing, and wondered for a moment if he'd dropped it in the water or just put it next to Sora's, before discarding that whole line of thought as unimportant. "That's interesting. I have to admit, I didn't think you were the type. I'm really surprised." She grinned. "Makes things more fun."

"Oh, so you think this is _fun_, Sora?" Riku demanded, looking about as aggravated as she had ever seen him, in-game or not.

"Isn't that what I just said?"

It was obvious that Riku didn't care one little bit for that sentiment, but it was also just as obvious that the lessons she had inadvertently been teaching him while the two of them were having it out had finally begun to stick. _That_ would certainly make things more than a little interesting. She and Riku circled one another, each looking for an opportunity to attack; for that one, crucial opening that would allow them to overwhelm their opponent.

Or at least to score a few free hits.

Deliberately leaving such an opening, wanting to know if Riku had truly learned his lesson about being so stupidly overconfident or if she still had a few more things to teach him on that front, Sarah waited a few moments as Riku took in her stance as the two of them continued to circle one another. When the silver-haired boy charged, after only a few moments of studying his loosened stance with an ever-growing smirk on his face, Sarah knew that she still had a few more harsh lessons to impart.

Grabbing Riku's right arm as he came within her strike-range, Sarah used his own momentum to whip him into a shoulder-throw that sent him crashing to the ground again.

"Wow," she said off-handedly, knowing that it would irritate him. "You must really like the taste of sand, Riku; you eating enough of it."

Worked like a charm; Riku was back on his feet in seconds, charging at her a few seconds after that, and slamming back into the ground a few moments after he'd run into the hip-throw that he'd been too angry to pay any attention to.

"How's all that sand tasting, Riku?" she asked cheerfully. "I always meant to ask."

"Why don't you try some of it yourself?" he demanded, rushing at her with both fists raised in what looked like a crude double-axe-handle.

Smiling just as cheerfully as she ever had, Sarah stepped just out of his path and then stuck out her left leg to trip him. Riku went sprawling again, flat on his face in the sand for the third time since they'd started this whole thing.

"You know, I don't think I'm going to be able to try any of that sand if you keep eating it all, Riku."

The boy in question looked back up at her, the expression on his face stating almost clearer than words that he'd have liked nothing more than to take her apart slowly, painfully, and piece-by-piece.

"You know, as fun as all this has been, I really think we should end it," she said, smiling to goad Riku into that final, fateful charge. "There's a lot more things to get done today, and I have to confess that I really don't have time to play with you anymore."

Dodging out of the way of Riku's furious charge a last time, Sarah grabbed his right arm and shoulder-threw him when he tried to come around for another pass at her. As Riku slammed into the ground for what would be the fourth and final time, Sarah shifted her weight and slammed an axe-kick into his head. When he had been sufficiently stunned that she felt that it was safe to move in closer, Sarah moved in behind him and slammed the side of her hand into the back of his neck.

"Good night, Riku," she said, smirking slightly as he slumped to the ground, unconscious.

Making her way back off of the tiny islet, Sarah sighed with some satisfaction as she crossed the bridge back to the not-so-much-bigger main island. As she walked, Sarah turned over the thoughts she'd had the first few times that she'd played KH1. There were some new angles now, new things that she had to take into consideration since she was dealing with real people now, but that didn't necessarily mean that all of her earlier conclusions were completely invalid; it just meant that she was probably going to have to rethink some of them.

If there was one thing that would completely blow her cover as Sora, it would be killing or incapacitating Riku to save the rest of the world; Sora just wasn't the kind of person to think like that.

Looking down at the entrance to the so-called secret place – a.k.a. the cavern where you met up with "Ansem" – Sarah turned her attention to the foliage surrounding it. It wouldn't quite be enough to provide perfect concealment; she would have needed something a lot thicker, deeper, or perhaps higher to provide _perfect_ concealment, but it probably _would_ give people the idea that she didn't want to be bothered.

That would most likely be enough; no one here had struck her as particularly rude or nosy those times that she had played. Still, better to be a bit overly cautious rather than not cautious enough under the circumstances.

With that thought in mind, Sarah settled "herself" down in one of the thicker patches of foliage just to the right side of the cavern's entrance. Taking out the journal that she had appropriated for herself, Sarah began to write down the things she had been considering even _before_ she had been rather forcibly shown that there was a real world with real people behind – or perhaps beyond – the TV screen.


	8. Journal Entry 3

_Well, since the world is going to explode soon – and there's pretty much nothing I can do about that – I might as well start preparing for the inevitable._

_Of course, the world-exploding thing might __not_ _be as inevitable as it seems. All signs point to Riku being the catalyst, the focal point, for "Ansem" and the Heartless to cross over into this world. Destroy the catalyst, and the entire invasion might go straight off the rails. Of course, one would want to be sure that they weren't directly connected to the act itself; which __does_ _rule out bludgeoning, strangulation, throat-slitting, or any of the various forms of death-by-stabbing._

_There are only kitchen accidents you can plausibly fake involving someone who doesn't seem to cook._

_Still, that doesn't I don't have __any__ viable options, it just means I'm going to have to be a bit more creative than I would have otherwise. Suffocation is still an option, provided it's not obviously deliberate. As is luring him out into deep water, then paralyzing his voluntary skeletal muscles so that he drowns. Though, I will admit that that's a _bit _more elaborate than I want to try making my plans at this point._

_Damn, _that _got a bit more morbid than I was planning; still, the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, or the one._

_I don't know just how many people call this planet home, whether it's thousands, millions, or 6.5 billion like on good old planet Earth, but if Riku is going to pose a danger to all of them, well- too bad for Riku. Still, I have to admit that I'm not particularly eager to take those kinds of measures if I don't have to. I'll take his measure first; who knows, maybe he's not as much of a thick-headed idiot as the first game would suggest._

_Still, anyone so damned, brazenly stupid as to give anyone as Obviously Evil as Maleficent the metaphorical time of day deserves at least a punch in the head. Which I'm probably going to give him sooner or later. Omnicidal Maniac or not, he's an irritating little shit._

_This one went on a bit longer than I was planning, so I'd better wrap up quickly – wouldn't want anyone realizing I'm not who they think I am._


	9. Falling Down

**_Chapter note:_**_ For the proper effect, play "Simple and Clean" by Utada Hikaru during the part of this chapter written in italics._

Once she had finished with all of that, Sarah felt a bit more tired than she could easily account for given the oh-so-brief scuffle that she'd had with Riku. Carefully tucking the journal away in one of the large pockets of the bluish-gray shorts that she'd managed to find in Sora's closet, Sarah yawned deeply and set about settling herself down on one of the softer, thicker patches of foliage nearby.

She wasn't particularly eager to wake up stiff and sore, even after what was probably going to end up being a short cat-nap, but since there were no beds in the area – and she knew that Sora wasn't really the type to go home just so he could have a nap – Sarah knew that she would have to make do with what she found. Patting down all of the nearby foliage, both to find the softest available and to make sure that there were no rocks – sharp or otherwise – under any of them, Sarah yawned widely one last time.

_Looks like this is the best of the bunch,_ she mused, coming around once again to the large bush that seemed to be made entirely of huge, low-growing green leaves in various shades of such.

After making a final check for anything that would bother her while she was napping – rocks, worms, beetles, spiders, or the odd lost left shoe – and moving out those few things she _did_ find, Sarah yawned for a third time, curled up within the leaves of the plant that she had just officially designated the "napping bush", and closed her eyes.

Her last coherent thought was that it would be funny as hell if she ended up having the same kind of dream that Sora did at the beginning of the game...

_... A figure, indistinct but clearly female, stands atop a circular, dark gray platform marked with a single, light-blue 'X' that stretches almost to the edges of the platform. As she takes a step closer to the center of the X, the platform shatters beneath her, and she falls into a bottomless gray abyss, tumbling over headfirst and turning into a streak of light as she plunges faster and faster._

_On a beach, a boy with spiky brown hair that seems to casually defy the law of gravity, looks out into the sky as an uncountable number of shooting stars fall toward the ground. One of them seems to be heading towards him, and he blinks up at it as it heads right for him. The shooting star disappears just before the boy falls to the ground on his back._

_The boy kneels, looking up to the sky, before looking down into the ocean in front of him. His reflection in the water changes to an older girl, her light-colored hair pulled back in a ponytail, as the water ripples. The boy plunges his hands into the reflection's face, and rinses his own with the water cupped in them; the resulting spray glitters in the air as it slowly falls._

_The boy stands up, seeing a taller boy with silver hair standing out in the ocean, a wave just beginning to crest behind him; the silver-haired boy reaches out his right hand, beckoning the brown-haired boy to come to him. The brown-haired boy holds out his own right hand, and the silver-haired boy runs back through the ocean to join up with the brown-haired one._

_The wave breaks as the two boys hold their clasped hands above their heads. A red-haired girl joins them, and the brown-haired boy clasps her hand as well, holding it above their heads. All three of them smile, as the brown-haired boy drops both their hands to his sides, then tugs them forward. The three of them race across the beach, holding hands and laughing._

_The ground underneath them begins to tilt upward, gently at first before becoming a steep incline. The three companions unclasp their hands, pumping their arms as they run up the incline; the silver-haired boy takes the lead, while the red-haired girl falls back to the rear. The ground begins to split under them, dividing into three distinct sections, as the remaining sand falls away to reveal that each one of them are standing atop a large pillar; the one with the red-haired girl being the lowest, then the middle one with the brown-haired boy, leaving the silver-haired boy standing atop the highest._

_The third pillar vanishes into the ground, taking the red-haired girl with it as the two boys turn to look back at her. The silver-haired boy reaches out his right hand to the brown-haired one, as the second pillar begins to tremble; holding out his own hand for a moment, the brown-haired boy pulls it back as the pillar shatters and he falls backward, covering his face with it, and opening his fingers just enough to reveal his left eye as he falls into the abyss beneath the pillars._

_A pair of hazel eyes open, blinking once before the face they're in subtly changes, and the eyes open slightly wider to reveal blue irises, blinking once more. The view pulls back to take in the boy's body from the waist up, as he continues to fall, turning slightly until he's falling head first. A ball of pulsating, white light appears in the center of his chest, swiftly spreading out to encompass his entire body, then spreading beyond the ends of his limbs; half a foot beyond the ends of his fingers, and a full foot beyond the tips of his shoes._

_The light wraps around his torso, rippling like sunlight on water, as it forms a distinctly human shape; the figure is larger than the brown-haired boy, and while still slender, is clearly more muscular than him. The swirling, shimmering lights hold the clear shape of a human figure, taller than the boy, and wearing narrower, more pointed boots that taper to squared-off ends, with slender fingers at the end of its arms. The chest area is more indistinct, making the figure's gender difficult to determine._

_Tumbling gently in the abyss, almost like a leaf freed from its mother tree, the boy rights himself as he continues to fall. An uncountable number of birds begins to take wing, revealing a glowing platform as the boy descends toward it. For just a few moments, he seems to be able to stand on the glowing boots of the rippling, ethereal figure surrounding him, his eyes closed as he raises his arms and curls his fingers outward, the ethereal figure mimicking the action._

_Just as he opens his eyes, watching the last of the birds flying out into the distance, the ethereal figure bursts apart into a cloud of stardust, hovering over the boy's head, and he lands on his own two feet._


	10. Dream Diver

_Song list:_ _Hikaru Utada, "Simple and Clean"; Masato Nakamura, "Casino Night Zone"; Aspect, "Sky High Zone"; "Outer Senshi Henshin/Attack theme"; Hikaru Utada, "Hikari"; "Starlights' Henshin Theme"; Nightwish, "Sacrament of Wilderness"; "Diamond in the Sky"; Kelly Clarkson, "Breakaway"._

It wasn't quite like waking up, since there were still elements of unreality to the situation, not to mention the whole issue of her _having gone to sleep before this._ It was still funny as hell, though.

"You- you're not really the one that I was expecting to meet, here."

It wasn't Ansem's voice – or Xemnas' or Xehanort's, whatever the hell _he_ sounded like – or even Yensid. _Well, there goes _that _wild mass guess,_ she mused, raising a metaphorical eyebrow. It was a dream; _everything _was metaphorical here.

"What's a wild mass guess?" the mysterious voice – it sounded like a boy's, early or mid teens if she was any judge – asked, and then continued before she had a chance to answer. "No, I can figure that out on my own. The real question is, why are you even here in the first place? Even _you_ know that you don't belong here."

"You know, I would really love it if I could find someone who could tell me that," she said glibly. "It would make me very happy."

"_You_ don't even know why you're here?" the mysterious voice demanded, then for the second time continued speaking before she had any chance to answer. "You really _don't_ have any idea how you ended up here. This place... it was never real, not to anyone in your world. It was just... one out of thousands of different games. That's... that's really something," the voice said, sounding about as confused as Sarah had ever heard an omni-directional, non-corporeal voice sound.

"So," she said, not knowing just how one went about soothing the nerves of a benevolent, non-corporeal intelligence, but figuring that getting things back on track couldn't hurt. "What happens next?"

"Well, since I think you already know where you are, and I'm sure that neither one of us knows how to get you home, why don't we just continue where we left off?"

"Sounds fair," she said, watching as three short, silver-and-white pedestals rose out of the ground. Out of the stained- glass, rather. "And hey, at least this isn't Casino Night Zone," she said with a shrug.

"Casino-" the voice of whoever was behind all of this began, and then he laughed. "No, this is _definitely_ not Casino Night Zone. Wow, that place is really weird. Nice music, though." And suddenly, the world was filled with it; the music of Sonic 2's Casino Night Zone filling the previously-quiet space. "There's so much of it," the voice said, sounding as if he'd entirely forgotten about her for the moment; the current situation was amusing enough that she was completely willing to forgive him for that. "Is all of it from Casino Night Zone?" Abruptly, the music of Sonic 2's Casino Night Zone was replaced by the Game Gear Sonic 2's Sky High Zone. "Oh, this one's called Sky High Zone. Or, is it just _from_ Sky High Zone? Or is it both?" the mysterious voice sounded confused again, but then he chuckled. "I guess it kind of _is_ both."

"You know, if it's all the same to you, I'd like to wake up sometime soon," she said, with a whimsical sort of smile. "So, if we could move things along?"

"Right, right," the mysterious voice said, and then laughed softly as the world around them fell silent again. "Well, since you've already been here so many times before – despite the fact that you've never been here at all, but let's not get into _that_ – and you already know what you've chosen, let's short-hand this, shall we?"

With those words, an unportentous as they might have been, the Mickey-headed magic staff appeared in her right hand, and the shortish bastard-sword – the hand-and-a-half marked with the sign of the Mouse – appeared in her left.

"You've chosen Magic and Might," the mysterious voice intoned, as off to the side of her the shield continued its lonely revolution. "You choose to be the Fierce Protector; you choose to be first in and last out," he continued, obviously trying to sound tense and pretentious; he didn't quite have the pipes for it, but he was making the effort all the same, so Sarah decided that she wouldn't poke fun at him. "Your strength is best used for protecting others. If you remember that, I think you'll be all right. You'll always have people at your back that you can trust," the voice said, sounding like he was making a promise. "Your instinct and training will see you through, if you just listen to them," the voice said, sounding like he would have been smiling at her if he'd only had a face.

"Yes, mine is the Keyblade that will pierce the heavens," she said, unable to resist the urge, lame as the line might very well have been.

The voice laughed, but then he probably hadn't had the opportunity to hear many jokes while he was stuck in wherever-this-was all alone like this. "You know, it just might be."

Right then, just as she had started to wonder when it was going to happen, the stained-glass panel that she had been standing on fractured into uncountable shards.

"Looks like the ground's going," she said, taking a look at the shards of what had once been a sturdy-looking platform.

"Well, maybe you should take a Leap of Faith."

Laughing softly as the shards of the platform she had been standing on began to come down all around her, Sarah stood poised for a few moments on the last unbroken fragment of the floor, before she leapt clear; her arms spread wide as though to embrace the void all around her. Landing as lightly as you please on the next platform in the sequence, Sarah looked up to the black, empty sky all around her, smiling slightly even as she raised her eyebrow as if to say _well_?

"You've gained the power to fight," the mysterious voice intoned, as the Mickey-headed staff appeared in her hands. "I suppose I don't have to explain the concept of Mana – not Mana Points anymore, just Mana – to you of all people. But you don't know any magic right now anyway, so you're not going to be using that energy for awhile; at least, not until after..." the mysterious voice paused, sounding about as depressed as she had ever heard from him; Sarah figured that she could pretty much guess why. "All of _that_ happens." And then, it was like the whole world sighed. "Are you _sure_ there's no way you can stop it?"

"I don't know," she said honestly, thinking back to all of her earlier calculations. "Can I stop it without knowing the ultimate author of this world's destruction?" Which was likely enough Masker Xehanort, the utter, short-sighted prick. "Maybe; I think I might be able to do that. Can I do it without making sacrifices?" An apparition of Riku faded into being in front of her; there was a kitchen knife jammed into the apparition's throat, spilling illusory blood all down the apparition's neck. There was a look of pure shock on "Riku's" face, as if what had happened had come as a complete surprise. "I doubt it."

As long as she was wearing this face – this body – any drastic action that she took against Riku _would_ come as a complete surprise; that was her greatest advantage.

"Let's not start planning anything drastic," the mysterious voice said, sounding honestly shocked by what he'd just heard and seen. "People who've been swallowed by the darkness still have the chance to come back. But, dead is," he paused as if overcome by what she had just implied that she would do, even to preserve a world that she had no real, personal interest in. "Dead is _dead_."

The apparition of Riku on the "floor" at her feet shattered just as the stained-glass platform that she had previously stood on, and the shards fell away to dust even as she watched.

"Would you have really done... something like that, Sarah?"

"Think about how many people there are, living on this world right now. Just people, nothing special; people who might be kind, who might be cruel, but each of them with lives and loves and hopes and dreams of their own. And now imagine someone who would sacrifice all of them – men, women, children just like himself – for the simple reason that he feels he's entitled to do so. And now tell me, honestly: does someone like that deserve the life that they were given?"

There was a long pause, during which the false world around her almost seemed to be holding its breath, and then the mysterious voice returned, sounding more subdued and more thoughtful than she had ever heard from him before. "So, for the sake of the world, you'd stain your own heart. That's..." another pause, this one shorter than the last though no less stunned-sounding. "That's really something."

"It's not that I'd be eager to do it, or anything." She'd decided to explain herself, so that the two of them would know where they stood. "Or that I don't know the consequences of those kind of actions-"

"I know," the voice said gently. "I know you know what you're doing. Just... be careful. Even with the best of intentions, Darkness can be dangerous. Maybe even _especially_ with the best of intentions."

"Yeah, I know," she said, thinking back on all tropes and the many, _many_ instances in history when people had committed horrific atrocities "with the best possible intentions". "That's why it's always important to pay attention. Too many people don't; they just spend their time sort of sleep-walking through life, only really waking up when they find themselves somewhere they don't like. And, even then, they don't stay awake for very long; mostly just long enough to get themselves out of whatever situation their lack of attention got them into in the first place. That's why the first rule is and always has been: stay awake. Pay attention to what's going on around you, and use what you can to either escape or improve your current situation."

"Nothing is true, everything is permitted," the mysterious voice said, sounding thoughtful again; Sarah smiled slightly.

"That about covers it," she said.

"Well, if you're going to work in the dark to serve the light, you're probably going to want to learn to fight it for real. This won't be just a video game anymore, Sarah."

"Yeah, I kind of noticed that," she said, turning her attention to the wide, empty expanse of the platform in front of her. Just before the Heartless began to appear, however, a new song began to play.

"What in the- is that music from Sailor Moon?"

"I thought it sounded good," the mysterious voice said, as the Outer Senshi Henshin/attack theme continued to play. "Besides," he said, with a soft laugh. "You seem to like to dance. So, show me how you dance, Sarah," the voice said, and for a moment Sarah could almost swear that he was smiling in fond amusement.

Maybe he was, or would have been under the right circumstances; those like having a face and all.

As the song – not a particularly long one and hence kind of odd to use in a battle – ended and the imaginary Heartless paused for a moment as if they were either confused or waiting for something, or possibly both considering the circumstances, Sarah made her way up to the forefront of the confused-seeming ranks of Shadows. Sure enough, just as she had begun to suspect would be the case, when the Outer Senshi theme began to play again, the Shadows surges forward to attack.

Moving with the rhythm of the music that seemed to be coming from all around her, Sarah slammed the magic staff down on the first Shadow that came barreling at her, then turned on her right heel and swept two more aside with a wide swing that would have been just as suited to someone with a Louisville Slugger. Stepping forward in time with the music that surrounded her dream-self, Sarah slashed, smashed, evaded, and engaged the dream-Shadows that were fighting her for supremacy in this place-that-wasn't-really-a-place.

Once the music had stopped, the last of the Shadows – the one that she had been too far away to tag in time – vanished like it had never been there at all.

"So," she began, feeling more refreshed than anyone could reasonably ask for after a fight. "How was that?"

"Good. That was good," the mysterious voice said, though he sounded a bit distracted; Sarah wondered why for a moment, before deciding that his thoughts were his own and she wouldn't pry into them.

She'd want the same courtesy for herself, after all.

Looking back down at the platform she was standing on she found that, sure enough, large blotches of darkness were appearing almost at random on the surface of the thing. Some of them would converge with each other, forming large pools or puddles of the stuff. It wasn't like normal darkness, which was just on absence of light; no, this stuff moved almost like a liquid, one that had been given sentience and a sort of animal hunger.

It moved like it wanted to consume everything. It was fascinating, in that same way that any wild, dangerous animal was; fascinating in that way that said look, but don't touch.

"I don't think I've ever met anyone who compared the Darkness to an animal before," the mysterious voice said, sounding thoughtful.

"Not many people _would_ think to compare the two, I don't think," she said absently, most of her attention focused on the liquid-darkness swirling just around her feet; it hadn't moved to cover them or to pull her under yet, almost as if it was asking permission. "Most people who encounter this kind of thing are too busy trying to escape from it to consider just what it is that they might be dealing with. Other people try to control it and end up getting eaten, since the one thing you never want to do with a predator is try to forcefully control it when you're one of its chosen prey. You can only avoid being eaten for so long under those kind of circumstances."

"Why do you say that, Sarah?" the voice asked, as the liquid-darkness around her feet began to swirl more enthusiastically.

"Well, when you control anything through brute-force, the one thing you always fear is losing that control. It's instinct; even if the fear itself is only subconscious: because whoever is trying to control the darkness by force knows that they can never let their guard down, they can never rest, they can never really _sleep_ again, or their hard-won control is going to slip and they're going to be devoured for it. At the same time, they know that it's impossible for anyone to maintain perfect awareness at all times of the day and night. Sooner or later, they'll slip; and if they're smart enough to know that, then they try everything they can to avoid that. That kind of thing makes them stressed, and that stress produces a fear of losing themselves. And, when you show fear to any kind of predator, but especially to a creature of pure instinct like a Heartless," _Or a Hollow,_ she mused, staring down at the mass of swirling darkness around her feet for a long moment; she'd wondered if the bright, purple-violet light that she'd glimpsed within the mass had just been an artifact of gameplay, just something to show that the darkness was moving rather than just sitting there, and as it turned out it was. Just not in the way she had figured it would be: there _was_ color within the darkness, but it was an indigo so dark that it almost looked black itself. "You're signaling that you're its rightful prey."

"I'd never thought of it _that_ way," the mysterious voice said thoughtfully. "But then, I don't think I ever studied animals or anything like that."

"So you _were_ actually someone else before you got involved with all of this," she said, looking back up and away from the interplay of color and darkness at her feet before she could become mesmerized by it again. "I'd wondered."

"Yeah, I was someone before I came here," the voice said, sounding as if he'd have been smiling gently if he could have smiled at all. "I just... don't remember who."

That melancholy feeling in the air, the one that the two of them never seemed to be able to escape, was back again in full force. She didn't even need to hazard a guess why: anyone would be depressed after talking about _that_ kind of thing.

Now, however, since there was really nothing else for them to talk about, she looked back down at the darkness that was still placidly swirling just slightly away from the heels and toes of her feet. It was almost as if there had been some kind of mutual signal given between the two of them; and on reflection, Sarah realized that there probably had been.

The next thing she knew, the darkness around her feet had swirled up around her body into something that probably resembled a hollow black tube shot through with indigo to anyone who was there to see it from the outside. The darkness still didn't touch her, however, and when Sarah stuck her left hand out into the body of the cylinder, it only felt like she was holding her hand out into a thick, chill wind.

"Well?" she prompted, staring into the dully-colored walls of the cylinder all around her.

That seemed to be all she needed to do, since the cylinder closed over her head just after she had finished speaking. It was like jumping out of a plane at night, falling through the cold air and wind on the way to a destination that you couldn't really see. But, it was like falling and also knowing – with prefect certainty – that you would not only survive the landing, but that you would be perfectly fine wherever you ended up.

It took some trust in the process to be able to do that, but she had jumped out of a few planes in her time.

Landing in a crouch when she had finished falling, more due to instinct than any need to absorb a nonexistent impact, Sarah rose back to her feet and surveyed the new platform she found herself standing on. It all seemed to be pretty much in order, right down to the off-pink door standing just outside the absolute center of the circular platform. The only thing that was truly different between the two scenarios was the fact that this particular off-pink door wasn't translucent in the slightest.

"Still with me?" she asked, looking up in the general direction that the voice seemed to be coming from.

"Yeah, I'm still here," the voice responded after a moment. "I was just getting my bearings."

"That's good to hear," she said; and it was, if kind of a strange sentiment from a disembodied voice.

Then again, given the fact that he'd obliquely stated that he'd been a human at some earlier time, maybe it wasn't so strange at all.

Making her way over to the off-pink door, the one that she could almost swear was made out of some kind of marble – or at least would have been if any of this had been real – Sarah heard something from the voice that she hadn't ever heard before, and hadn't honestly ever expected to: he was laughing. Like someone who had either heard a funny joke or thought of one.

"What's so funny?" she asked, turning to look back up at the voice even as she stood in front of the off-pink door.

"This is not a field-icon. It won't show up on your Command Menu when you approach anywhere closer than a few feet, because you don't _have_ a Command Menu anymore. Because this isn't a video game."

She tilted her head slightly. "It appears my inner-voice is a wiseass. How_ever_ shall I react to that?"

"Please; your _outer_ voice is a wiseass, Sarah. Now, would you kindly step through that door so we can start getting to know each other better?"

Sarah couldn't quite hold back a laugh as the voice used that particular phrase, and she wondered for a moment if he knew just what kind of significance it held – or if she should tell him – before deciding that that particular reference/in-joke required a bit more explanation than she really wanted to take the time for. "All right, but I'll tell you this right now: if this leads to some dippy personality quiz, I'm going to find a way to get to where you are so I can kick your ass."

"Yeah, I'm getting how much that thing irritated you," the voice said, after a few seconds' pause. "You're not going to find anything like that through this door. That wouldn't even have told me anything about _you_, anyway. The answers were all pre-set, and the questions weren't particularly relevant, anyway."

"That's reassuring," she said, making her way over to stand in front of the large, pale-pink double-doors that stood just off-center on the platform she had fallen onto.

It was now completely obvious that they would have been made out of some kind of marble if any of this had been real, and as she paused to consider that for a moment, Sarah wondered about the doors that had appeared in front of the cave that Sora, Kairi, and possibly Riku had covered carvings. And, even about the Door to Light itself.

Would they all manifest as double-doors made out of some kind of marble, or did that kind of thing just depend on the expectations of the person seeing them? If she concentrated on changing her own expectations, could she then make the doors appear as one of the sliding-doors on Star Trek? Or even a mini-Stargate?

She probably wasn't going to get the chance to test out her idea when the first real door appeared, since then she was going to be just a _little_ bit preoccupied with the whole exploding-planet deal, but the Door to Light itself might be a good time, since things would have calmed down quite a bit by the time they all got there.

But all of that, as interesting as interesting a mental diversion as it was, was for later. Now, she had a task to complete. It might not have been the most vital of things out there in the "real world", but here it would take her one more step closer to waking from this strangest and most lucid of all dreams.

Pressing her palms against the cool, smooth stone of the doors, itself no more real than she was in this place-that-wasn't-quite, Sarah shoved them wide open while driving in a deep-forward stance. The expected flash of light near-blinding light came, no more painful than anything else that she hadn't really experienced here, but when it cleared, Sarah saw something that she hadn't been expecting at all.

She stood at the threshold of her own room, back in her house on the world that she was aiming to get back to at the end of all this. Everything was just how she had left it, or maybe she should say just how she _remembered _it. Because there was no way that this scene, as wonderful as it was to see, could be anything but a memory.

"You're right," the voice said, before she could start to wonder for too long where he was. "I pulled this memory out of your heart. I wanted to see what your house looked like, to see if I could get to know you better by seeing the place where you grew up. But, you _didn't_ really grow up here, did you?"

She laughed softly, even as the remix of "Hikari" that played during the opening of the Japanese version of KH1 began to play in the background, as if to underscore just how deeply bizarre and completely unreal this whole situation was. "No, I _definitely _did _not_ grow up here."

For a moment, the whole of the room she now stood in wavered slightly, becoming noticeably less-than-solid as she thought about the other rooms that she had spent time in while her eldest brother, her father, and the mother that none of them knew particularly well all worked to save up the money to truly establish themselves in their own space. None of those rented spaces had really been home, had really felt like _hers_, in the same way that this place – one that she'd carved out with tools and time and money – had always felt. The music that had been playing in the background, soft enough up to that point to be rather easily ignored, became louder then.

The song itself was just the same as it had been when she'd first noticed it, which made things a bit amusing for her for reasons that Sarah didn't particularly care to examine; but even as their surroundings became clear and solid once more, Sarah saw an apparition of herself in the middle of the room.

And the apparition actually _looked_ like her, right down to the just-over-shoulder-length dark-blonde hair pulled back in a tight-ish ponytail at the back of her head. From her current distance she couldn't see the hazel eyes that the memory-her would have had – the ones that could look either light brown or light green depending on how the light hit them – and the long, buttoned-up white coat obscured the comfortable, casual clothes that she wore 99% of the time.

The reason that memory-her was wearing said coat, as well as the pair of plastic woodshop goggles that she currently had on, was made plain by the rather large chainsaw that she was currently jamming into a wall that was just as semi-transparent as she was.

"This might seem like kind of a strange question, Sarah," the voice said, sounding like _he_ at least thought it would be. "But, why were you chainsawing a wall?"

"Renovation," she said plainly, as the memory-figure in front of her changed to one that was smoothing out the floor with an electric belt-sander. "You would not _believe_ how small the rooms were in this old house when we bought it." Or he might, depending on the kind of house he'd lived in, back when he'd still been alive; but then he couldn't actually _remember_ any of that, so it was really a moot point in any case. "I needed to knock down the walls to three of them, just so I could have a place I'd feel comfortable for more than just sleeping. Two of the others I use for a closet and a Costume Vault, and then there's my game room," she said, tilting her head and smiling in a fond, nostalgic way.

"Costume vault?" the voice echoed, sounding like she'd caught his interest. "Why do you have something like _that_? What do you keep in there? I mean, aside from the obvious," the voice finished, after a short pause during which Sarah thought that someone with a face would have looked sheepish.

Smiling a bit wider to put him at ease, and because it was seriously starting to amuse her how easy it was to hold a conversation with someone who wasn't actually there; pretty much like talking on the phone, really. "I use it to store what I feel are the best examples of my work, or just the ones I like better than any of the others."

"Your work?" the voice echoed, sounding ever-so-slightly confused; the same way that most people who were just getting to know her sounded when they found out that she had a job. Or, someone who'd only seen one side of her, when they found out what it was. "What do you mean by that?"

"Williams' Creature Shop; cosplay, cosplay accessories, special effects in conjunction with . You want something that doesn't exist? I can make it for you," she said, feeling a definite swell of pride as she completed the spiel, before realizing that she had probably sounded a lot like a used-car salesman and hence having to resist the urge to facepalm.

"Wow, that sounds interesting," the voice said earnestly, bringing the smile back to her face. "Can I see your costume vault?"

"In a manner of speaking," she said, even as the strains of "Hikari" playing in the background served to remind her of the unreality of their current situation.

Making her way to the far end of her remembered-room, to the same wall that her non-game TV rested against, Sarah turned a sharp right at said far wall and headed for the door in the wall perpendicular to it. The door itself was fairly plain, dark-brown and unadorned by any of the signage or posters that she had hung on the door to her room or the one leading to her workshop. But, in this case more than some others, it was what was _behind_ the door that really counted.

When she opened the door to this remembered version of her Costume Vault, Sarah found that the light was already on. That fit, since whenever she opened the door to her Vault, the first thing she would always do before anything else was to turn on the light. The thing that _did_ strike her as kind of odd about the Vault she was now looking into was the fact that none of the costumes she was looking at were covered in any way.

She had always kept them under opaque dust cloths, both for obvious reasons and to keep the ones she wasn't showing off for potential clients from being faded by the lights. The costumes she was currently seeing were all completely uncovered; but then she supposed _that_ fit, too.

There wouldn't be any risk of dust or fading in a place that was made out of memories, and the dust clothes had never made much of a mental impact as compared to the costumes; Sarah really shouldn't surprised not to find them.

"So, who _are_ all of these guys?" the voice asked.

Sarah almost smiled at the sheer, odd nostalgia of the situation. _Looks like I have another client._

The voice laughed. "If that's how you want to think of it," he said cheerfully. "Go ahead, wow me with your mad sewing skillz."

Laughing softly as she made her way past the front of the group of freestanding, costumed mannequins, Sarah paused to consider them for a moment. "You know, if you really want to get the full effect of any of these costumes, you really need to see them with-" she fell silent for a long moment, because just before she'd said the last word of her intended sentence, a wig had appeared on the blank, faceless head of every mannequin that had been arrayed in front of her. Hair in a variety of styles and colors, some more outlandish than others, appeared to spill down the necks – and sometimes across the foreheads - of the mannequins in the Vault.

"Wigs," she finished, though there was no real reason for her to bother anymore.

The voice chuckled softly, sounding about as amused as she felt whole situation, and Sarah rolled her eyes briefly before making her way to stand before the red-and-black costume at the center-front of the room.

"This one here is Vincent Valentine," she said, looking fondly at the wine-red velvet and black cotton outfit that represented some of her best work to date. "It's mostly machine-made, but I did do _some_ hand-stitching, too. Mostly around the buckles and clasps, but I also did a fair bit of it on the cape," she said, walking around to the back of the mannequin to display that very feature. "Now, much as it pained me to shred up a perfectly good length of velvet," she tilted her head wryly, inviting him to share in the joke the same way she had done with her other first-time clients. "That was what the costume called for. Of course, to make sure that the fabric itself didn't start to unravel, I had to stitch up parts of the "frayed" edges, but I made sure that that kind of thing wouldn't be too noticeable. Now, the main thing you want to be aware of when you're making a costume for someone is whether or not they want it to _look_ like a costume. Some of these pieces _are_ costumes, even in the series they come from: something that a character puts on and takes off. Something that has to be kept in good condition for presentation's sake. At the same time, some of these outfits here – like's Vincent's, for example – are working clothes in the series they come from. Something that the character in question has lived, worked, and even – most importantly with regards to both the costume and the character wearing it – fought in. so, depending on the level of realism you're looking for, you're going to be seeing frays, seams that might be coming loose, or even those that have started to unravel and had to be repaired – either by a professional tailor or the character themselves, if there's any real reason for them to have developed those kinds of skills – and ragged edges along the cuffs of the pants and sleeves."

"Wow," the voice said, sounding just a little overwhelmed. "I never knew there was so much to know about clothes."

She chuckled softly, having heard that sentiment and a few more just like it during the three years she'd been doing business for herself. Sometimes it could be annoying, but the voice hadn't sounded arrogant or dismissive, so Sarah in turn felt no desire to drive a ballpoint pen into his eye.

"There is when you're the one making them," she said, then smiled in rueful recognition. "But really, it's the same way for everything most people take for granted: it takes a lot more effort to make things than most people realize when they just look at something. That's why I try not to take anything for granted. I'm not saying I succeed all the time or anything, but I at least try to remember that."

"I guess that's all people can really ask: that other people remember them," the voice said, sounding like he was talking about something else entirely.

Sarah didn't have to think long at all to realize what that was. "Even without a name, I think it'd be pretty hard for me to forget _you_."

The voice laughed softly, sounding about as happy as she had ever heard him. "Thanks, Sarah. That means a lot to me."

"Anytime," she said, looking up in the general direction that the voice had always seemed to come from.

"You know, I think you might just be able to do this, Sarah," the voice said, after what had clearly been a pause for some needed thought. "Your heart might not be pure Light, but you seem to have a better relationship with Darkness than anyone else. The way you talk, I don't _think_ you'll fall to it."

"Thanks for the vote of confidence," she said, smiling to take the sting out of what, under other circumstances, would have been a particularly sarcastic turn of phrase.

"Well, no one can really know what the future holds," the voice said, sounding like he'd have been smiling if that whole pesky lack-of-a-face thing hadn't gotten in the way. "Eve you don't; not really. You just know how they went for _a_ Sora, during a game you played. You know the general shape of events, but just by being yourself and not Sora, you're going to change the specifics."

She chuckled. "True."

"Come on, I think we've talked about costumes enough," the voice said. "Why don't you show me the rest of your room?"

"All right," she said, pausing to brush an imaginary flake of dust from "Vincent's" left shoulder. "A tour it is, then."

The voice laughed softly, and Sarah turned to grin up in his general direction. But, just as she was about to start making her way out of her Costume Vault, Sarah found herself standing in front of the chest-high, Plexiglas-fronted-and-topped display case that stood at the near-center of her collection, right next to all of the Guyver figures. Sitting under a Plexiglas box – that in the real world she had to keep dusted – was a large, cold-cast resin piece that she doubted would ever lose its pride-of-place as the prize of her collection.

Of course, the fact remained that these shelves of hers were on the opposite side of the room from the door to her closet and Costume Vault; as well as being in the middle of the wall rather than the far right like the door to her Vault.

"Space is a bit wonky in here," she commented, wearing one of her more whimsical smiles.

"This is a memory, Sarah," the voice said, sounding like he'd have been smiling again if not for the whole disembodiment issue. "Space is what you make of it in here. Anyway," he continued, as she shot a Look in his general direction. "Tell me about these guys. The two in the middle look happy, but those two on either end of them look scary," he paused for a moment, and then continued in a far more subdued tone. "They look like monsters."

She smirked, though the expression was a bit more reflective than usual. "Most people seem to think that when they first see these two; even some of the people they're trying to protect."

"These four are heroes, you mean?" the voice asked, sounding curious but like he could be convinced. "All of them?"

"There's really only two of them present; those two armored-looking things on the far sides of the bench those two are sitting on are actually alternate forms that those two transform into to fight," she explained. "The technical term for that would be Henshin Hero," she said, with a semi-amused smile.

"Oh," the voice said. "Well, tell me about the two of them, then."

"This is Takaya Aiba, and his twin brother, Shinya," she said, pointing first to the red-haired figure sitting on the right-hand side of the sculpted bench, and then to the blond-with-green-undertones leaning against his back. "They're from a series called Star Knight Tekkaman Gemini. Now, this piece was a limited-run "OAV special" sculpt – one of only five hundred that were ever made – from Comic Con 2000. And, I've gotten completely off-topic again, haven't I?" she asked rhetorically, having a rather strong urge to either facepalm or roll her eyes.

"It's all right," the voice said, with that same understanding tone he'd had before. "I can tell how much it means to you. But really, five hundred pieces doesn't really sound that limited to me."

She laughed outright that time; she couldn't help it. "It is when you go to an even like Comic Con, believe me." She paused, smirking slightly. "Heck, given how many people show up every year, even one or two _thousand _pieces wouldn't last much longer than just the five hundred they made of this one."

"Wow," the voice said, sounding stunned by what he'd just heard. "I couldn't even _imagine_ that many people in one place. That building they have it in every year must be _huge_."

"It's the San Diego Convention Center, made just for those kinds of events," she said, then chuckled softly. "Of course, lately there's been some talk about moving it out of the area, since all of the various events have started to spill out into the hotels surrounding the Convention Center."

"That's… I don't even know what to _say_ about something like that," the voice said, sounding for once completely stumped.

Sarah laughed softly. "Not so many people on _my_ world do, either."

"Each of these figures, they have a story behind them, don't they?" the voice asked, though the question itself sounded rhetorical.

Sarah somehow doubted that he was merely talking about how she'd gotten them. "Yeah. Each of these characters comes from a different series," she said, with a wide sweep of her right arm to take in the five shelving units standing side-by-side. "And all of them have had at least _some_ part to play in their respective stories. Some bigger than others," she finished, as her roving eyes fell on eleven figures of The Doctor, some of his many, _many_ Companions, and the TARDIS itself at the back of the group.

"I wish I could hear more of them," the voice said, sounding wistful.

"Who says you can't?" she asked, raising an eyebrow. "This _is_ a dream, isn't it? Time is what we make of it, here."

"You're partly right, Sarah," the voice said, still sounding wistful, but also like he'd have been smiling again were it only possible for him to do so. "This conversation we've been having may be happening at the speed of thought, but time _is_ still passing in the outside world," the voice continued, and Sarah knew that he was just as interested as she had been in the conversation that they could apparently no longer have.

"Well, I suppose I'll just have to come back so we can continue this," she said, folding her arms behind her head and looking up in the voice's general direction.

"I'd like that," the voice said, though his tone sounded like he didn't think that that was particularly likely.

She'd just have to prove him wrong, then.

The room around her faded out into light, with the music that had been just loud enough to register on an almost subconscious level while she and the voice had been talking – and had still been "Hikari" on an endless loop – becoming louder in what she would have almost thought was an effort to call attention to itself in an actual, living thing, before fading out with the remnants of the light.

When the last of the light had faded away, Sarah found herself standing back on the familiar, brightly colored platform.

"I trust you know what to do?" the voice asked rhetorically, as the Mickey-marked sword appeared in her hands.

"Right," she said, sinking into a defensive stance as the telltale figures of Shadows began to fade into view; she was a bit curious about the sword thing, since the weapon that had usually appeared in her hands was the staff, since she had always chosen magic first for the sheer amusement of raining down fire, lightning, and other unpleasant things down on the heads of her enemies, but as another song started up – the Sailor Starlights' battle theme this time – and the Shadows jumped in on the attack, Sarah knew that it was time to stop thinking and start fighting.

Moving with the rhythm of the music, immersing herself in it she struck and dodged and struck again, Sarah reflected briefly that this was easier than any fight that she would ever encounter in the outside world. She'd no need to worry about catching her breath, not much about keeping her balance; and hell, she wasn't even burning calories and hence wouldn't need to eat more later. It would be all too easy for her or anyone to get complacent after too much fighting like this.

Once the last of the Shadows had been cleared from the field, with the song playing in the background having only had to repeat itself twice, Sarah allowed herself to relax, if only in a mental sense.

"You're almost there, Sarah," the voice said, sounding wistful again; she wondered a bit why that was, since it wasn't like the two of them would never meet again.

"Yeah," she said, watching in detached semi-amusement as the stained glass stairs formed out of the nothingness all around them, leading up and off to the next platform – the _last_ platform – just out of sight. "One last stop, eh?"

"Yeah," the voice said, not sounding sad, but not sounding like he was particularly _happy_, either. "One last stop."

"Don't worry," she said, smiling up in the voice's general direction once again. "We still have a conversation to finish. You should know that I never leave a conversation unfinished if I can help it," she grinned. "It's against my religion."

Saluting the surrounding void with her sword, Sarah chuckled softly as she heard the voice's incredulous, cheerfully surprised laughter. Making her way up the stairs in front of her as the echoes of the voice's laugh died away, Sarah mentally prepared herself for what she would soon be facing. The Darkside; one of the most piss-easy and yet fuckhuge enemies in KH1.

She didn't know if that held true for the series as a whole, since she hadn't played much of said series, but then she wasn't going to be _facing_ enemies from the series as a whole; just Darkside and his little horde of Shadows.

When she stood at last atop the final platform, Sarah looked out into the surrounding void and smiled slightly.

"This is the end-game, Sarah; the final test," the voice said, still sounding a bit depressed by the idea but nowhere near as down as he had before. "Are you ready for this?"

"Ready, willing, and able," she said, both to let the voice know how things stood, and to perhaps make him feel a bit better.

"All right," he said, and for a moment Sarah thought she could _feel _the false world around her shivering in anticipation. "Then, begin!"

Even expecting it the way she had learned to do from the last two times – or three, depending on whether one counted the instance beyond the door or not – the music that started after she had demonstrated her resolve came as something of a surprise. It was by Nightwish this time; the song called Sacrament of Wilderness.

A song that she had listened to several times while she had been beating seven kinds of crap out of "Ansem"-possessed Riku; it was a song that she remembered fondly.

Light flared behind her throwing Sarah's shadow out, long and distorted, on the platform before her. As the Darkside rose like some twisted, ancient colossus, Sarah gave ground so that she would have the room she needed to maneuver when the time came. She was already picking up on some differences between this Darkside and the one that Sora had faced in KH1.

This particular Darkside's head seemed to be smooth and completely hairless for one, a sharp contrast to the mass of writhing, dreadlock-looking tendrils that had crowned the head of what could have been called Sora's Darkside.

As this particular Darkside rose to its full, imposing height, Sarah looked up the length of the oversized Heartless to see if she could spot any other differences between the one that Sora had – or would have – faced, and the one that she was now facing.

_What in the- I don't believe it, it's-_ "_Mercer_?" she finally said aloud, the sheer incongruity of her current situation finally overcoming her oft-stated resolve not to speak in battle unless she was taunting her opponent.

Okay, so it wasn't _actually_, Prototype's Alex Mercer, but damn if it wasn't a very good likeness; even on a creature made of darkness, Sarah could spot the details of Mercer's trademark outfit.

The folds of his untucked shirt, his hoodie, and the leather jacket that he wore over all of them were clearly defined on the Darkside she was facing, although they were smoother than they would have been on any human who had worn them; even those that had been on the in-game figure of Mercer himself. The Darkside's legs were perfectly smooth, and clearly muscled like the rest of the figure, but Sarah had the distinct feeling that if there had been a scrap of color on that Darkside apart from black and yellow, it would have been the faded blue of Mercer's jeans. The Darkside's yellow eyes glared down at her from the shadows of its deep, black hood; and even as she watched, four long, sinuous, barb-tipped tendrils emerged from the Darkside's back, two on each side.

Sarah knew those tendrils as well as she knew any of the other gameplay-elements of Prototype: these were the extra appendages that Alex used to grab his prey, to pin them down and hold them in place for a viral feeding-frenzy. She didn't quite know what the _Darkside's_ tendrils would do if they managed to catch hold of her, but given what – or rather, who – the thing's form was based on, Sarah was willing to bet that it wouldn't be anything good.

Jumping back and out of the way as the Darkside-Mercer's pseudo-feeder-tendrils stabbed into the spot where she had just been standing, Sarah watched in mild surprise as four dark-portals appeared at the impact points and each spat out four Shadows before closing. _I kind of wondered what else those things were going to be used for,_ she mused, as the Darkside drew itself back up to its full height and glared down at her with those freaky, empty yellow eyes.

Keeping a part of her field-of-vision focused on the Darkside so that she would know if it tried to do anything drastic and hence be better able to avoid it than she would have been otherwise, Sarah waded – slashing and hacking – into the fray with the Shadows.

The fast tempo of the music all around her served the same purpose as it had before, during the fight with possessed-Riku at Hollow Bastion: to energize and invigorate her so that she fight to the best of her ability. The Shadows put up a fairly decent fight, but without the limitations of the real world to hold her back, Sarah was done with them in what felt like only a few seconds.

When Darkside-Mercer slammed its tendrils into the ground all around her for the second time, Sarah decided to take a calculated risk. Grabbing the tendril closest to her, Sarah wrapped her left arm around the tendril and gripped the sword she'd been given all the more tightly in her right hand. Riding the ascending tendril up to Darkside-Mercer's hooded head, she let go just as the tendril began to thrash. Sarah ended up landing on Darkside-Mercer's left shoulder.

With barely a moment spent to steady herself after the landing, she ran across the shoulder and slammed her sword down on the oversized Heartless' head. Darkside-Mercer recoiled from the blow, and Sarah quickly grabbed hold of the thing's hood to steady herself as the creature made every effort to throw her off.

Using her handhold as leverage in a way that she never would have been able to if the laws of physics had been in full-effect, Sarah whaled on Darkside-Mercer with the sword in her right hand. She barely spared a thought for anything besides the colossus she was currently beating on, only sparing enough to ensure that she wouldn't be taken by surprise by any of the tendrils it was sporting. So, when thick, black smoke began pouring out of the thing's hood, Sarah took no notice of it at first, only continuing to pound away at her adversary.

It was only when her footing began to feel particularly treacherous that Sarah jumped free, landing in a low crouch after what she could have almost sworn was a backwards Leap of Faith.

Darkside-Mercer collapsed on his side facing her, huge yellow eyes boring into her own, and wisps of smoky darkness rising from its remains like steam. Almost as if the giant Heartless was being boiled away.

"Wow," the voice said, as Sacrament of Wilderness faded into the soundless – or mostly soundless – void around them. "When you get into a fight, you _really_ get into it, don't you Sarah?"

"Sometimes," she said, as in front of her Darkside-Mercer evaporated and faded away into nothingness. "So, I guess it's time for me to wake up now, huh?"

"If you really want to," the voice said, though he didn't sound particularly enthusiastic about the idea.

Of course, given his rather unique circumstances, Sarah found that she couldn't really blame him. After being so completely alone for God-knew-how-long, and then finally finding someone to actually talk to rather than just lob exposition at… well, _she_ might not have been entirely enthusiastic about the prospect, but then she'd never had any particular problem with solitude. Still, this being a realm of thoughts and memories and all, maybe she didn't have to just leave.

Not without giving a certain, mysterious voice one hell of a send-off, at least.

Concentrating, drawing on a memory that always – and probably always would – been one of her personal favorites, Sarah watched the stained-glass pillar they were standing on, as well as the empty world all around them, changed to a place that she knew quite well. Even after having spent such a comparatively short time in there, she remembered it well; scenes of happy memories always _did_ seem to linger, she'd found.

"_Another day is like a new beginning…"_ sang the new song that had started as the empty world around them both transformed into the cabin of a jet, cargo-bay doors opened on the warm, bright, breezy sky that practically _invited_ one to leap out and embrace it on the way down; to feel the wind wrap around you, and catch you before you had fallen too far.

The sky was calling: time to fly.

"So, _that's_ what you really look like," the mysterious voice said, and when Sarah looked over at him she found that she had to smile.

"That's an interesting self-image you have there."

And it really was; seemed a certain mysterious voice was well and truly enamored with the whole "mysterious man of mystery" thing. The Mysterious Figure – Sarah thought that since he actually _had_ a figure now, changing his designation a bit wouldn't be too presumptuous – was dressed from neck-to-feet in an outfit that looked like some bizarre hybrid of motorcycle leathers and a wet-suit. The suit itself was sculpted to look like it had muscle tone, and on anyone else it would have looked completely stupid; and Sarah would have laughed at the wearer for their pretentious overcompensation.

Still, if a guy who didn't seem to remember what he'd looked like wanted to make himself look good, she wouldn't be the one to go stomping all over his fun.

"I don't think this is really what I'm supposed to look like," the mysterious figure said, examining his gloved hands with the blank, featureless motorcycle helmet he had for a head. "It's just… this is the first thing that came to me." He shrugged, seeming a bit helpless, even through the flat, featureless nature of his costume. "I don't know, maybe the person I was before met someone who looked like this."

"Could be," she said, noting that the music had stopped while the two of them had been talking, and restarting it with a thought as she made her way over to him.

"So, what are we actually _do_-" the mysterious figure trailed off, his body language expressing pure shock – rather eloquently, Sarah thought – as he stared out the open doors at the back of the plane. "Wow; we're _really_ high up."

"No better altitude for sky-diving," she said, smiling as she adjusted the pair of mirrored, polarized ski-goggles that she had just manifested for herself.

There wasn't really much point to her having them, Sarah knew, since there was no actual wind to whip past her face as she fell; witness the complete lack of noise in the cabin, aside from the music and the two of them speaking at points.

"_Sky_-diving?" the mysterious figure echoed, looking from her to the vast expanse of air between them and the tiny-looking ground so far, far below them.

"Yeah," she said, nodding as she manifested the snowboard that she had used for this particular dive; or really, the dive that this memory of hers was based off of. "It's something fun to do, back where I come from."

"The people on your world have weird pastimes," the mysterious figure said, continuing to stare out the cabin doors, even as a snowboard – black like her own, and hence fitting in really well with his whole ensemble – appeared in his hands.

She laughed. "Well, not _everyone_ in my world likes to go sky-diving," she acknowledged, still smiling. "In fact, it's kind of considered a strange hobby back where I come from, too."

"That makes sense," he said, as she joined him just at the threshold of the open doors. "I think it also explains _you_ fairly well, Sarah."

Clasping his right hand as the mysterious figure offered it to her, Sarah laughed, wordlessly conceding the point. As the two of them mutually pulled each other from the plane, falling through the silent air and music, Sarah kick-flipped so that her feet – now strapped to the snowboard beneath her – pointed toward the ground far below them.

"You know, this actually _is_ kind of fun," the mysterious figure said, laughter in his voice as the two of them continued their descent. "It's almost like flying!"

"I know!" she called back, as the music swelled around them, and she swung her body around to send herself into a controlled spin.

It was kind of strange, not hearing – or even _feeling_ – the loud rush of the wind as it blew past her, but at the same time it served to remind her of the sheer unreality of her current situation. It was a lot like the music she kept hearing, really.

When the current song began to wrap up, Sarah mentally prepared herself for the awakening – possibly a rude one; there was no real way of knowing, given how much she had already changed things – that she was sure was soon to follow.

When the mysterious figure clasped her hand again, the two of them falling together as the last strains of "Diamond in the Sky" played out around them, Sarah looked over at him and could have almost sworn that he was smiling at her.

"Thanks, Sarah; this has all been really special to me. Even if you _do_ forget about me later, I know that I won't ever forget about you." He tilted his head slightly, and Sarah had the very clear impression of his smile widening. "So, since you showed me something that was special to you, I'll show you something that feels special to me."

The music around them swelled again, but it was a very different song that began to play. As the landscape beneath them changed from your standard-issue empty grassland that always seemed to be used as the skydivers' go-to LZ into a small trio of islands, and grew several times closer on top of that, Sarah chuckled softly. It almost figured that the Destiny Islands would show up again, somehow.

_-Grew up in a small town, and when the rain would fall down, I'd just stare out my window.-_

The two of them surfed the remaining distance to the main island, their snowboards kicking up rooster-tails on the formerly placid water.

_-Dreaming of what could be, and if I'd end up happy; I would pray.- _

They walked beside a row of palm trees, back out to the old plank bridge that she had crossed sometime earlier back in the outside – she hesitated to say real, since while that place was certainly _a_ reality, it wasn't _her_ reality – world.

_ -Trying hard to reach out, but when I tried to speak out, felt like no one could hear me.-_

Standing for a few moments on the tiny islet that she had really only been to once, Sarah was faintly surprised when the mysterious figure took her right hand in a gentle grip and settled his own right hand on her left hip. Mimicking his actions with a certain amount of amusement for what she now knew he was about to do, Sarah took a moment to be profoundly grateful that this was all just a dream; ballroom dancing was _not_ her forte.

_-Wanted to belong here, but something felt so wrong here, so I pray, I could break away; I'll spread my wings and I'll learn how to fly, I'll do what it takes till I touch the sky.-_

The two of them traded roles, her leading for a few rounds as the mysterious figure leaned in closer; his entire bearing spoke of loneliness, so for his sake Sarah smiled as they danced.

_-Now make a wish, take a chance, make a change, and break away. Out of the darkness and into the sun, but I won't forget all the ones that I love; I'll take a risk, take a chance, make a change, and break away.-_

He was leading again, his blank, featureless helmet allowing no reflections, but even in spite of that, Sarah could almost swear that he was smiling. Maybe he was.

_-Want to feel the warm breeze, sleep under a palm tree, feel the rush of the ocean. Get onboard a fast train, travel on a jet plane, far away.-_

The landscape around them blurred slightly as they spun around one another in the dance.

_-And break away; I'll spread my wings and I'll learn how to fly, I'll do what it takes till I touch the sky; now make a wish, take a chance, make a change, and break away.-_

When the mysterious figure took her hands, holding them with the same gentleness that he had displayed while the two of them had been dancing, Sarah smiled wider; she didn't quite know what he was planning, but she knew at least enough to know that she didn't have to worry.

_-Out of the darkness and into the sun, I won't forget all the ones that I love. I gotta take a risk, take a chance, make a change, and break away.-_

The mysterious figure swung her around again, giving Sarah another nearly complete view of the small islet they were dancing on.

"Buildings with a hundred floors, swinging 'round revolving doors; maybe I don't know where they'll take me, but gotta keep moving on. Moving on. Fly away. Breakaway," the mysterious figure sang, as he continued to lead her through the dance. "I'll spread my wings and I'll learn how to fly," the mysterious figure continued, leaning his head against her collarbone. "Though it's not easy to tell you goodbye," he straightened up and continued, though he held her a bit closer than before. "Gotta take a risk, take a chance, make a change, and break away. Out of the darkness and into the sun, but I won't forget the place I come from." He pulled her closer, moving more slowly as the song came to a close. "I gotta take a risk, take a chance, make a change, and break away." He moved closer, slowing the dance until the two of them were barely moving at all. "Breakaway," he held her close, the two of them no longer moving at all, and his head resting on her collarbone again. "Break away."

The dream-world fell silent as the song ended, and then the world itself began to fade to black as the dream that they had met in ended at last.

However, when the world around her was as dark as the space underneath her blankets when she slept, Sarah heard the mysterious voice speak for a last time: "Abandon your fear; look forward."

Sarah thought that she had to have smiled. "Go forward; never stand still."

"Retreat and you age."

As she began to register physical sensations again, and just before she could be forced by her own body to acknowledge them, Sarah spoke the last words of the oath; the promise that had tied two others together, though not in circumstances quite like this: "Hesitate and you die."


	11. Scrappers

She awoke to the feel of someone kicking her foot – Sora's foot, rather – and for a moment Sarah was sorely tempted to pitch a dirt-clod at the head of whoever was responsible. She doubted that that was something that Sora would do, however, and she'd been slipping out of character enough times that she was pretty sure Kairi was starting to have suspicions, so she decided to hold off on doing anything else that was blatantly un-Sora-like. At least to the best of her ability, and while she was around those people that knew him.

She couldn't count on _everyone_ having Riku's brand of aggressive tunnel-vision, after all.

"All right, all right, I'm up," she said, sitting back upright and opening her eyes in almost one, smooth motion.

The ones standing in front of her weren't those that she had first expected, but when she had regained some of her faculties after her long nap, she realized that she should have probably figured that these three guys would be the ones to show up.

"Hey, Sora, you finally awake?" Tidus called, as she yawned.

"Yeah, I'm up," she said, running her hands through Sora's hair in an – most likely futile, but whatever – effort to bring order to that sheer chaos.

"Great!" Tidus exclaimed, grabbing "her" raised right hand and pulling "her" along until they reached the open patch of sand by the docks where these particular fights had taken place in-game. "Now that Kairi doesn't have you running all over the place collecting stuff, we can finally have that match of ours," the boy said enthusiastically, smiling as Selphie tossed "her" wooden sword over to Sarah. "Don't think I'm going to go easy on you!" he called, still grinning widely.

"Likewise," she said, smiling back as she saluted him with the sword in "her" right hand.

His first strike was aimed at her wrists, a good strategy but easy enough to dodge that she did so mostly on reflex. His next was aimed low, trying to take out her ankles; she jumped quickly over that one. Still, the fact that the kid was using tactics that she herself would often employ – not to mention the fact that he wasn't an arrogant little bastard like Riku – was worthy of a fair bit of respect as far as she was concerned.

With that in mind, Sarah decided to forgo both the verbal and non-verbal combat taunts that she sometimes employed. She would win this fight with her own physical strength; there would be plenty of times when she would be able to psych out her enemies. Like the other times she was going to end up tangling with Riku, for instance.

Besides, she was making an effort to act more "Sora-like", and Sora had never been one for taunting his enemies while he was fighting; or anytime at all, really.

Blocking another strike with the flat of her wooden sword, Sarah spotted an opening in her opponent's defense. Not knowing if it was deliberate or not, Sarah circled slowly to the left, blocking an overhead strike as she did so. The opening was still there, and more than that, Tidus didn't seem to be aware of it. At the same time, it didn't seem like calculated indifference; like something meant to lure her into committing to an attack so that Tidus could counter it or be in a position to unleash some manner of unpleasant surprise on her.

It _did_ genuinely seem like Tidus was completely unaware of the opening he'd left for her or anyone else to take advantage of.

A single one of his strikes slipped through her guard, and Sarah shifted to take the blow on her left shoulder. It was a small price to pay. Ducking a wide sweep from Tidus' staff, Sarah swept her wooden sword forward and into Tidus' gut. Following swiftly on the heels of her initial attack, Sarah slammed the blunt tip of her sword into the same point that she had just tagged with the side of the "blade" and Tidus went down.

Just before she could deliver the final blow, however, she noticed that Tidus was actually _laughing_.

"Wow, Sora," the boy said, rising back to his feet with his left hand over his stomach. "I think that's the fastest that anyone's _ever_ managed to beat me." He'd stopped laughing by the time he said that, of course, but his wide grin was still in place. "Can I be on your side, next time?"

"Sure," she said, relaxing her stance and letting her sword rest point-down on the sand.

"Great!" Tidus exclaimed, rushing over to her side almost before Sarah had finished speaking. "All right!" he exclaimed, taking a combat-stance next to her; staff held out like he was ready for trouble. "This time, Sora and I will take you _both_ on!"

With a brief shrug and a mental "what the hell", Sarah raised her wooden sword and retook her own battle-stance.

"All right, then," Wakka said, smirking as he tossed his ball into the air and caught it again. "But don't expect _us_ to go easy on _you_, either, mon!"

"Yeah!" Selphie exclaimed, cracking her jump rope like it was an actual whip. "We're going to win!"

"The loser gets the drinks, while the winner sits and rests," she said, the battle-happy smiles on the three kids surrounding her having reminded Sarah of one of her favorite animes. "If you hold back, I'll pound you!" she finished enthusiastically, grinning and dramatically pointing her wooden sword at her self-chosen opponents.

All of them laughed, as she smiled widely at them.

"You know, I think that's actually a pretty good idea," Tidus said, once he'd managed to regain his composure. "All right: losers get the coconuts, while the winners sit and rest," he said, grinning as he moved to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with her, just opposite Wakka.

Which, of course, left Sarah herself facing Selphie; something that she couldn't help but find incredibly amusing. _Is this the Designated Girl Fight, I wonder?_

"If you hold back, we'll pound you!" Wakka returned, bringing Sarah's attention back to the present moment.

Back to the fight that had just begun.

Selphie was on her seconds after Wakka had made that little declaration of his, and as she deflected what seemed like a probing-strike from the other girl's jump rope, Sarah's mind went into analysis mode even as her combat-instincts surged to the fore, countering or evading the younger girl's attacks.

She had some advantages in this fight, having already gotten a taste of Selphie's fighting-style while she had been playing through the Destiny Islands-centric parts of KH1. Still, the advantage wasn't as great as some people might have thought: none of the enemies in-game could be disarmed, and not even the greatest of video game AIs could react to a changing combat situation with the same fluidity and unpredictability as a human. Not to mention the limited, hence limiting, moveset that all video game characters had.

Still, just because her experience with Selphie in PS2-sprite form wasn't comprehensive enough to tell her _everything_ that the younger girl would try in a fight like this, that didn't mean that she was just going to disregard it. It still provided her with _some_ basis for anticipating Selphie's attacks, and even – to some extent – judging her fighting style.

Selphie had seemed to be primarily – almost exclusively, in fact – a long-range fighter, using what amounted to a light flail to keep her opponent at bay; she really hadn't seemed to have any skill in close quarter combat at all. Anyone who could weather her strikes and close to within arm's-reach would, therefore, gain a significant advantage. Still, there was no real need to weather your opponent's strikes when you could just disarm them and be done with it; not unless you were trying to intimidate them into submission.

Grabbing the plastic handle of Selphie's jump rope as it was flung at her head again, Sarah reeled the younger girl in by the simple expedient of twisting Selphie's jump rope up around the arm that she wasn't holding her wooden sword in. Selphie, not being particularly stupid, let go of her jump rope once Sarah had gotten four loops around her off-arm, and Sarah was glad for it. There was no real challenge in pounding on a stupid opponent.

Some amusement, yes, but no challenge.

Springing forward before Selphie could recover from the shock of being disarmed so thoroughly, Sarah slammed the flat of her wooden sword into the younger girl's gut, then crouched to deliver a sweep-kick that knocked Selphie to her knees. Taking a moment to make sure that the younger girl wasn't going to try to get up and make trouble again, Sarah turned her attention to the fight that was still going on between Wakka and Tidus.

It seemed to be going fairly well, though showing some signs of carrying on for longer than she would personally prefer; still, she could fix _that_ easily enough.

"Banzai!" she shouted, as Wakka fell to the sand with the full force of Sora's weight bearing down on him.

When she looked up at Tidus, still standing there holding his wooden staff, she found him shaking slightly, and when she grinned up at him he burst out laughing. So did Selphie, and she could even feel Wakka laughing underneath her. Laughing along with the rest of them, Sarah slid off of Wakka's back and stood up again.

"Well, that's _one_ way to end a fight," Tidus said, once he'd managed to catch his breath; he was still snickering a bit, though.

"Yeah, but could you try something that's not so hard on my back, next time?" Wakka groused, rising back to his feet as he rubbed at his back as well as anyone who wasn't double-jointed had ever been able to.

"Right," she said, grinning. "I'll keep that in mind."


	12. Logistics

"Sora!" The sound of that familiar voice drew Sarah's attention, and she waved to Kairi as the other girl made her way over to where the four of them were standing. There were still traces of that inscrutable look that she had worn several times during this past day, but for the most part Kairi seemed pleased to see her. "C'mon, it's almost time to go home."

"Oh, yeah," Tidus said, sounding like Kairi's reminder had hit home for him as well. "We should be getting back, too." Slapping a companionable hand on "Sora's" right shoulder, he grinned. "See you tomorrow for another round, Sora."

"Yeah," Wakka added, tossing his ball up and catching it with an ease that hinted at long practice. "This time, _I _get to be on your side."

She chuckled. "Well, I _am_ flattered by your gracious invitation, but I think I might be busy that day," she said, tilting her head slightly in Kairi's direction. "It's a fairly big day for us."

"Right," Kairi said, coming over to clap Sarah on the same shoulder that Tidus once had. "A very big day for us," she continued, wrapping both of her arms around "Sora's" left and squeezing slightly; with anyone else, Sarah would have called that a non-verbal signal.

A subtle request to play along with what was going to happen next; still, this was _Kairi_ she was dealing with here. Not exactly one for subterfuge.

As Kairi gently steered her toward the small dock, Sarah noticed that they were the first to arrive. It was kind of interesting, she had to admit, seeing what had happened before and after – and even sometimes between – the events that she had seen in KH1. As long as you didn't think too much about what was going to happen next; she tried not to, since that way lay madness and bludgeoning Riku to death with a frying pan.

"You're not really Sora, are you?"

The sound of Kairi's voice, and more than that the words that the other girl had just said to her, brought Sarah's mind back to the present moment with a harsh, and she could have sworn almost audible, slam.

"Why do you say _that_, Kairi?" she asked; the first part of damage-control, after all, was to assess how much damage you had _to_ control.

"I've known Sora for a long time," the younger girl said, looking right into Sarah's eyes with an intensity that she hadn't seen in very many people. "Maybe not for all my life, the way Riku has, but long enough to know what he's like. And you… you don't walk like him, you don't smile like him," she paused for a moment, eyes roving to take in Sarah's relaxed, open stance. "You don't even _stand_ like him, not really. And," she looked down for a moment before looking back up, right into Sarah's eyes again. "You really only talk like him when you have the chance to think about what you're saying," she paused, glancing down for a moment before seeming to steel herself to go on. "When someone catches you off-guard… It's like you're a whole different person."

All she could think, for those few moments with Kairi's eyes locked on Sora's own, was that her efforts at damage-control were well and truly fucked; and before they even began, too. That _had_ to be a new record.

"Have you told anyone else about this?" she asked, wanting to know if there was any part of this situation she could salvage, and a bit morbidly curious about just how fucked she actually was.

"No, I haven't," Kairi said, looking a bit more certain than she had been when she had first confronted Sarah, but also more curious.

"Because it would have sounded crazy, right?" she asked, chuckling as she tilted her head slightly.

"Is that why _you_ didn't tell anyone?" Kairi returned, the expression on her face beginning to smooth out into relief, though she still looked curious.

Moreso than ever, now.

Sarah laughed softly. "Provided that everyone _didn't_ think that I was pulling some kind of elaborate joke on all of them, I'd be bundled up into a straight-jacket and tossed into the nearest crazy house so fast you'd probably think I was in a time-warp," her chuckle was a bit harsher this time. "So yeah; good reason _not _to tell anyone what's going on with me. And that's probably the best I could hope for, if someone actually believes all of this." Sarah looked down at Sora's hands, trying not to feel the complete and utter _wrongness_ of her current body; if her and Sora's situations truly _were_ reversed the way that she'd once thought, she could only hope that he was doing all right. "There are times even _I_ don't believe it."

A hand on "her" right shoulder brought Sarah's attention back to the present moment; back to Kairi and the Destiny Islands, and all the problems therein.

"I'm sorry." Were the first words out of the younger girl's mouth. "I didn't think about hard this would be on you. I worried so much about Sora that I didn't even _think_-"

"It's all right," she said, putting "her" hand on Kairi's shoulder in turn. "Sora's your friend, you said you've known him since the two of you were kids." She smiled, squeezing Kairi's shoulder softly to put the younger girl at ease. "It's only natural that you'd be concerned for him before you'd worry about someone you don't know from Eve." Seeing that the self-recrimination on Kairi's face hadn't diminished one bit, Sarah decided to change the subject somewhat. "Really, I'm kind of impressed."

"By what?" Kairi asked, looking back up at Sarah, but still seeming pretty down on herself.

Sarah didn't know if what she was going to say would make the younger girl feel better or not, but she was going to say it nonetheless. "I don't think that most people would have been able to spot that I was acting a bit off," she said, thinking back on all of the other people that she had met during the course of this day. "Or, that I was _acting_ at all. Even if they did, most of them would have just shrugged it off as something normal; like someone having an off day or something. If they didn't just brush it off as themselves seeing things, anyway," she laughed softly, reflectively. "Most people aren't very honest with themselves." When Sarah turned her attention back to Kairi, she found that the younger girl was giving her a once-over, and didn't seem quite sure what to do next. "Sorry," she said, tilting her head and giving the younger girl her best reassuring smile. "Went off on a tangent, there."

"No, it's just…" Kairi shook her head, then looked back up and into "Sora's" eyes with such a profound expression of honest worry that it was all Sarah could do not to wince in sympathy. "It you're _here_, then where is Sora?"

_Ah, that _is_ the million-dollar question, _Sarah mused, huffing softly. And really, what could she say in response to that? What did she, honestly, have to offer? Conjecture? Speculation? A random, wild guess that, when this – whatever the hell it was – had happened, Sora's consciousness had swapped places with her own instead of being displaced and flung out into the cosmos; or, worse yet, overwritten?

"I… honestly have no idea," she said, then had to laugh in rueful acknowledgement. "I really don't have much experience with this kind of thing, I have to admit."

Kairi wasn't laughing, of course, since it was _her_ friend's life that was potentially on the line here, but she _did_ seem to be making the effort to smile; if only just for Sarah's sake.

"Sorry," she said, not wanting the younger girl to feel like she had to keep up appearances at a time like this. "When things start going weird on me – particularly _this_ weird – the only thing I figure I can really do is to laugh at them; panicking never really helped anyone, after all. I didn't mean to make you uncomfortable."

"No, it's all right," Kairi said, glancing down briefly before turning a more genuine smile on her. "I keep forgetting that this is all as strange to you as it is to me," Kairi looked to the side, her expression sheepish. "I keep forgetting to consider _your_ feelings, and I'm sorry for that."

"It's not a problem," she said for the second time that day. "You're worried about your friend; anyone in the words would feel the same." She continued to smile, more for Kairi's sake than her own at this point.

"Thanks," the girl in question said, smiling a bit, but still looking like she didn't quite know what to do or say.

Sarah could definitely understand the sentiment.

"So, I'm guessing you have some questions," she prompted, smiling wryly at the expression on Kairi's face.

"Maybe," the younger girl said, the expression on her face turning solemn again; almost sad, really. "But, there's only one that's really important: is Sora all right?"

_Sure, go straight for the unanswerable one,_ Sarah mused with a sigh; she didn't _say_ it of course, blunt as she was Sarah tried not to be insensitive, but it was still the first thought that came to her mind. "I don't really know," she confessed; sure, comforting lies had their place, but that wasn't what Kairi had asked for. "Really, there's no way for me _to_ know, I don't think. He could be anywhere, really," she said, turning her gaze slightly to take in the vast ocean and the waves that Kairi stood with her back to; these islands really _were _beautiful, even rendered in PS2 graphics they'd looked good. And she was dodging the issue. "I could just be possessing him; which would be strange enough, let me tell you," she took a short breath, ran "her" tongue over "her" top row of teeth, and pressed on; like any uncomfortable thing that had to be done, best she got this over with quickly. "I could have forced his consciousness out of his body when I ended up here, so he could be drifting un-anchored in the cosmos somewhere. Or-" the sensation or something – rather, _several_ somethings – digging into "her" lower-arms, just above "her" wrists, brought Sarah's attention back to the present moment from where it had apparently strayed.

The expression on the younger girl's face was more determined than any of those that she had worn during any of the games that Sarah had played; as if through sheer force of will – force of _belief_ – she could change reality itself. Maybe she could; it wouldn't have been the first time that Sarah had had something that she could have sworn was impossible actually happen.

It would have been the second, actually.

"No," Kairi said, the pressure of her fingertips as they dug into "Sarah's" lower-arms adding a certain – and certainly painful – counterpoint to the other girl's voice and the expression on her face. "It wasn't anything like that."

She would have asked how the younger girl could be sure of herself and what she was saying, but that would have been completely insensitive. Besides, it was blatantly obvious – from both the tone of her voice and the expression on her face – that Kairi _wasn't_ sure of herself or what she was saying. Desperately trying to convince herself, yes, but she wasn't sure because _no one_ could be sure under these kind of circumstances; no one could really know for sure what had happened to Sora, and Kairi knew this.

That was what was hurting her so much, and that was why Sarah wasn't going to say anything further on the matter until or unless the younger girl asked.

Besides that, she made it a point never to practice psychological warfare on anyone who wasn't her enemy.

"Right," she said, smiling for the other girl's sake. "He's probably a bit freaked out – you know, being stuck in my body and all – but my father and my brothers are most likely helping him settle in."

"Yeah," Kairi said, not looking convinced so much as she looked like she wanted to _be_ convinced; or that she was trying to convince herself. "Thank you," she continued, after a few moments of contemplative silence. Then, with hardly any warning at all, Kairi leaned forward, wrapping her slender arms around "Sora". "And, I'm sorry that you had to get stranded so far from home like this. I promise, I'll do everything I can to help you get back home."

She chuckled softly, touched by the offer and the obvious sentiment behind it. "Thanks," she said, wrapping "her" left arm around the younger girl's upper-back. Then, remembering what was going to happen only a day hence, Sarah sighed. "And, for what it's worth, I'm sorry."

"For what?" Kairi asked, looking back up from where she'd had her chin leaned up against Sora's right shoulder.

Sarah chuckled softly, but more bitterly than she had since first coming to this world. "For not being fast enough."

Kairi obviously didn't understand the admittedly cryptic reference that Sarah was making toward future events, and the end of the world in particular, but that was probably for the best; no sense having _two_ people stuck wondering whether the future was immutable or not.

"We should probably head for the dock," she said, when Kairi didn't seem inclined to break the silence. "Riku might already be there waiting for us."

Best not to get _too_ off-track with regards to in-game events; dense as Riku could be at times, even _he_ wasn't _completely_ stupid.

"All right," Kairi said, seeming a bit dubious but still willing to follow Sarah's lead.

As the two of them separated from their impromptu embrace, Kairi took "Sarah's" right hand and gently began to tug "her" forward. Sarah was glad for the help; the geography of this particular island was more than a little fuzzy in her head – most of the transitions between scenes had been cross-fades, and there hadn't been a flyover to take in the whole island at once that she could clearly recall at the moment – and Sarah would have been the first to admit that she had been a bit too preoccupied with other matters to take much note of her surroundings this first day. Any of her various senseis would have kicked her ass for that kind of a lapse if they'd been here to see it.

Hell, Big Mack himself would have been first in line for that if he could have somehow seen what she'd been doing for the first part of her first day here; hell, he'd have probably had her running that junior-SERE course he'd set up with the help of some of his buddies from the service until she felt like all of her limbs were about to spontaneously detach.

Resisting the urge to shudder at the thought, since it was entirely likely that Kairi would feel it and hence start wondering what else was going on, Sarah turned her attention to studying the island itself. Not for the sake of having a terrain-advantage in future fights – no, _that_ would go straight down the shitter when Darkside showed up and the entire island started coming apart like wet tissue-paper along with the whole planet that it was a part of - but simply so she could get her bearings and not keep feeling so damned _lost_ all the time.

The first thing that she noticed was that they weren't heading toward the dock, but instead back to the tiny islet that she had already been to twice – though admittedly one of those times _had_ been just a dream – and Sarah found that she couldn't quite recall if this was something that had happened in-game, or if this was somehow a product of her interference; it _had_ been some time since she had played this particular game.

When Riku saw the two of them approaching, Kairi still holding "her" right hand as they made their way over to the tree he was leaning against, his eyes seemed to pass right over the other girl – pausing only to take in "her" and Kairi's linked hands – and lock right onto "Sora". Biting back a smirk at the pouty look on his face when their eyes briefly met – he was obviously still pissed about the way she'd thrashed him up, down, and sideways when they had met in combat that one time – he clearly wasn't too happy to see them like that. She was _so_ tempted to smirk at him, or wink, or offer the kid a cheerfully-mocking wave – KH1!Riku being so amusingly easy to rile up and all – but Sarah restrained herself; oblivious Riku might have been, but even a completely stupid person could eventually come to suspect that _something_ was going on, if they were presented with enough evidence.

"So, what were you two doing?" Riku asked, trying to sound nonchalant and failing miserably considering what Sarah already knew about him.

"We were talking," she said, considering and then dismissing the idea of needling him about that.

Kairi already had her pegged, and while she was fairly okay with the other girl knowing that particular secret, being found out by someone as oblivious as _Riku_ would be an insult to her skills as an actress.

"What were you talking about?" Riku asked, still watching Sarah as if he could figure out all of her secrets if he just looked hard enough; fat chance.

"The raft; we're going to need a lot of supplies if we're going to be sailing into possibly-uncharted territory, the way it seems we're planning to." That was always the one thing that had irritated her about this part of the game, no matter how many times she reminded herself that it was just a Disney game and so she shouldn't hold it to any particularly high standards: the almost complete lack of attention to logistics was a real pebble in her shoe whenever the relevant scenes had come up.

Sure, the three of them had just been kids, probably a lot younger than her, and depending on where they lived they may have never been camping before; but, if it hadn't been for the whole world-shattering Kaboom, and the preceding Heartless invasion, Sarah had very few doubts that the three of them would have starved to death en rout to whatever they thought their destination was. If they didn't get caught up in a tropical storm and capsized, anyway.

"Really? Like what?" Riku asked, and for once he seemed completely focused on an important issue.

Sarah decided to make use of Riku's complete focus while she had it; no telling how long it would last.

"Fishing tackle, for one; no telling how long we're going to be at sea," she said, in spite of the fact that she knew damn well that none of them were going to be leaving this island by raft; by other means, yes, but the raft was pretty much just a footnote in their collective story. "So, there's no way to plan out just how many days' worth of food we're going to need."

Riku's jaw worked a bit, like he was either about to say something or just chewing on the inside of his lip while he was deep in thought. "Yeah, good point," he said, his expression far-off and thoughtful in a way that she had never seen on him before. "I think my dad might have some fishing stuff we could use."

"Can you see if you could get him to lend it to us?" she asked, pleased that she had managed to get him to take what she was saying seriously so quickly. "I know he won't be too happy about the whole "borrowing indefinitely" part, but we're going to need that stuff if we're going to have any chance of getting more food after our initial supplies run out."

"No problem, Sora," Riku said, that confident expression that he always seemed to wear appearing on his face again. "I just won't tell him how long I want it for. I mean, what's he going to do once we get underway? Come after the raft so he can ground me?"

Sharing in Riku's clear amusement at the idea of his heretofore-unseen father making any sort of appearance on their adventure – strange as it was going to turn out – Sarah chuckled right along with him. "Good point."

"You shouldn't be so eager to lie to your dad like that," Kairi said, the disapproving look on her face switching from Riku to Sarah herself in the space of about half a second. "And _you_ shouldn't be encouraging him, Sora."

The slight emphasis that Kairi placed on her current alias – the name of the boy whose body she was borrowing – let Sarah know that this conversation probably wasn't one that Sora would have started on his own. But, fuck it; if she'd been stuck here by some kind of cosmic force that was beyond mortal comprehension – which, given everything that had happened and was continuing to happen, was starting to look like an honestly plausible explanation – she was at least going to make _some_ kind of an impact. If the Powers That Be had wanted _Sora_ to handle the upcoming crisis, after all, then Sarah herself wouldn't have ended up getting sucked into her PS2 at the beginning of all this.

And, sweet fricking hell, that was weird to even _think _about.

"Technically, it's not a lie. Well, strictly speaking," Sarah said, as both Riku and Kairi turned to stare at her with curiosity – in Riku's case – and disapproval.

"How can you _say_ that?" Kairi demanded. "How can something that's not true _not_ be a lie?"

_Well, time for an object lesson,_ she mused. "Riku, what if I told you that there was an uncharted island with incredible treasure; not just more money than you would be able to spend in five lifetimes, but a lamp with a friendly genie inside that would grant you any five wishes you could think up?" she asked, watching the expression on Riku's face change from curiosity to avarice as she described this hypothetical island; clearly this lesson had been insufficiently demonstrated in the past, so she'd have to be a bit pointed with Riku now.

"I'd ask what direction this island of yours was in, and how far I'd need to sail to get to it," the silver-haired boy said, smirking.

Sarah answered with one of her own. "And then? What if, when you got there, you found that the island was surrounded by jagged rocks, sharp enough to reduce even the strongest boat to splinters and broken planks? And, what if you found out that there was a riptide so strong, that – even if it _didn't_ drag you to the bottom of the ocean and drown you – would smash your unprotected body against those rocks until there was nothing left of you but shredded meat and bone-chips? What would you say then?" she asked, light and quiet in the suddenly echoing silence.

"What?! But that- that would be a dirty trick," Riku said, his fingers still twitching as if he wanted to clench his fists but he couldn't decide who – if anyone – he was really angry at.

"Why? Would you have asked about it?" she asked, raising "her" eyebrows in exaggerated – but not entirely feigned – curiosity. "Would you have even thought to wonder why a place with such an obvious attraction remains uncharted? Why no one wanted to put it on a map? Why it would even be there in the first place, if it was something so enticing and wonderful that everyone would want to get their hands on it?"

Riku had fallen completely silent now, jaw working like he _wanted_ to say something, but lips closed as if he couldn't quite figure out what that was. She chuckled. "You've never seen a mouse trap before, have you, Riku?"

"What does _that_ have to do with anything?" Riku asked, looking a bit startled but covering it after a few seconds.

"You've never seen the trigger-mechanism; the way it's set up to hold out a piece of food, just in front of a high-tension bar designed to snap closed when the trigger holding the food is disturbed too much."

"I still don't see why you're telling me-"

"It breaks their necks, Riku," she verbally steamrolled. "You see, a mouse is not typically equipped with the self-awareness necessary to stop and assess a potentially dangerous situation; you are, so I suggest your keep that in mind."

"Sora, what-"

"Nothing is ever truly free; anyone why tries to tell you otherwise is either naïve, using you, or trying to sell you something. Try to keep that in mind, will you?"

There, that was as close as she could come to outright telling Riku that he was going to become the patsy of an evil fairy with ambitions at being a Multiversal Conqueror – which she was inevitably going to fail at, since if she ever made it to the Marvel universe, Dormammumu would eat her alive, and if she tried anything in DC comics or any of its various offshoots, Darksied would be all over her; to say nothing of the kind of mess Maleficent would get herself into if she tried to challenge any of the Chaos Big Four from the Warhammer 40k 'verse – without everyone here thinking she had _completely_ lost her mind. Still, if she managed to actually get Riku to _think_ about the consequences of his actions rather than just reacting all the time, then she would be satisfied.

It would at least give him a better shot at throwing off Maleficent's influence _before_ "Ansem" body-snatched him.

"Sora, I don't think," Kairi began, before sighing and cutting herself off. "Why don't we go back to talking about the raft? What else so you think we'll need, Sora?"

The subtle emphasis that the younger girl put on Sarah's currently assumed name, combined with the rather pointed look the younger girl was giving her – with the expression of complete and utter "what the fuck?" that Riku was wearing providing a rather amusing contrast, particularly since the two of them were standing so close together – let Sarah know that she and Kairi would likely be having some sort of a Serious Talk at some point in the not-too-distant future. For now, however, she had camping advice to a pair of people who had clearly never been camping before in their lives; how fun.

"We're going to need something to sleep on; sleeping bags if we can manage it, blankets and quilts if we can't, and either way we're going to need pillows. After all, it's not like we're going to be able to check into a hotel and use their beds, at least not without any money."

"Maybe we should bring some along, then," Riku said, clearly having gotten over his brain-lock at what she had said to him; time would tell if he actually listened, but that was an important first step all the same. "Just is case we _do_ find a hotel over there, or at least a supermarket."

"Yes, and maybe we should bring some hunting gear along so we'll have something to trade if we run into fur trappers," she said, in that dry, deadpan tone she always reserved for when she was being particularly sarcastic.

Naturally, Riku didn't pick up on a bit of it. "Yeah, that's a good idea; I'll see what I can get from my dad," Riku looked back up, his calculating expression fading to a slightly sheepish one. "I'm going to have to wait until we actually have the raft ready to set sail before I can actually get it out here; no _way_ is my dad going to let me borrow his hunting rifle, even if I _do_ get him to lend me those three fishing poles."

"Your dad has a hunting rifle?" Kairi asked, just before Sarah could articulate that selfsame question.

Though really, she was more amused by the sheer incongruity of something so deadly as a rifle – she wondered for a moment what brand of rifle it was, if brands here were somehow the same as in her world, and just where Riku's father had managed to obtain a firearm in the first place – in a world as comparatively gentle as KH1.

"Yeah, my dad likes to go off on hunting trips when he has the time off from work," Riku said, adopting a thoughtful, reflective expression. "He says that it's nice to remind himself that he's still alive when he gets out of the office," Riku paused for a moment, seeming to marshal his thoughts. "I don't really know what he means, but he always sounds happy when he says that."

Sarah could guess what the man in question had been getting at, even though they had never met, and weren't likely to do so in the future; even if you _were_ doing a job that you honestly loved – like she was, or like the guys at Channel Awesome who employed her for some of their more elaborate physical effects – it was still nice to take the time to do something more physical, just to do something that was completely outside of your normal routine.

Didn't matter of it was hunting, sky-diving, B.A.S.E. jumping, or something entirely different, just so long as it was something you didn't spend all of your time on during day-to-day life.

Though she, personally, preferred a crossbow when she went out hunting; since they were quieter than rifles, and a bolt was a hell of a lot easier to remove from a carcass than a rifle bullet. Still, at least Riku's father, whoever the hell _he_ was, didn't hunt with a _shotgun_; she'd never been able to take anyone who hunted with a shotgun seriously. And, at least the world was going to explode before she would be forced to explain the finer points of gun safety to someone who could – charitably – be considered rather impulsive.

"All right," she said, once it had become obvious that no one else was going to continue the conversation. "So, we'll have the option to fish or to hunt after we get away from civilization, the means to shop or trade if we meet up with other people, and a warm place to sleep when we get tired," she listed off, more for her own benefit than either of theirs; if there was anything that this expedition of theirs was missing, she was the one most likely to spot it. "Ah, we'll also need something to cook with, if we don't want to be stuck eating raw food all the time," she mused, chewing "her" lower lip thoughtfully.

"Can't we just cook things over a fire?" Riku asked, sounding curious and slightly dismissive.

"Sure, if all you're thinking about is catching fish," she retorted, smirking. "And, somehow I doubt you'd enjoy the prospect of shoving raw, bloody meat chunks onto skewers when you inevitably got tired of eating fish all the time."

"Sora, that's gross," Riku said, a smirk starting to show on his face, too.

"That doesn't make it any less true," she returned, half-closing "her" eyes in amusement at Riku's antics.

"All right, that's enough teasing, you two," Kairi said, firmly interposing herself between the two of them. "Anyway, it's getting really late; we should start heading home."

When Kairi finished that sentence, she had been turned slightly more toward Riku, having once glanced at "Sora" before looking to the silver-haired boy, probably as a compromise owing to the fact that she couldn't look both of them in the eye at once. However, as soon as she had said those two last, little words, the younger girl winced, looking back at Sarah with an easily readable expression of mixed guilt and remorse on her face. Sarah, for her part, didn't have to waste time guessing the reason for that.

Clapping Kairi on the right shoulder, with a smile to show that there weren't any hard feelings for the other girl's perceived insensitivity, Sarah shrugged. "I think we've about covered everything we need for this trip, so let's head back now. Just don't forget what we talked about, you two," she said, though she was speaking more for Riku's benefit than for Kairi's.

He wasn't exactly the brightest crayon in the box, and he was impulsive enough that it almost didn't matter if he was, so best to remind him as gently as she could.

"Don't worry, Sora," Riku said, cocky smirk in place once again. "I'll make sure we have everything we need; just leave it to me."

"I'll hold you to that," she said, grinning in spite of the fact that she fully intended to pack her own travel bag.

Not for some rafting/camping trip that was never actually going to happen, but for the hotel she was going to be staying in during the times when she wasn't exploring Traverse Town or traveling between worlds with Donald and Goofy. She'd already begun to compose a list of supplies in her head, one that she would commit to paper before she went to bed tonight, while the three of them were making their way back to the boats they had come here on.

And, as first Riku and then Kairi and then she all launched their small craft into the open water, Sarah continued to hold her list in the back of her mind.

She'd already done this once before, and she still had Sora's muscle-memory to fall back on; besides, as unlikely as it was considering her previous experience with such, it _was_ possible that she had forgotten something during her initial list making.

By the time the three of them had made landfall again, the sun had started to set in earnest and Sarah had remembered an essential part of any travel-pack, particularly when one was going to be heading into contested, hostile territory: a First Aid kit. She would probably have to build one herself, since it wasn't like she could go buy one in the limited time she had to work with, and she wasn't going to take Sora's family's even if they _had_ one. It would take a bit more time and effort to assemble one from scratch than just using a pre-made kit, but if it turned out that Sora's family _didn't_ have one, she would still have one of her own.

"Sora, would you mind walking me home?" Kairi asked, bringing Sarah's attention back to her present circumstances once more.

Climbing up and out of the boat she'd still been sitting in, Sarah ran "her" hands through "her" hair as she stretched "her" legs. "All right, Kairi. If you really want me to."

"I do," the other girl said, giving her a "this is very important" look.

"Just make sure you don't space out during the trip _there_, Sora," Riku said, smirking at the pair of them. "Otherwise you'll _both_ end up getting lost."

He was completely oblivious to the subtext of their conversation, but in this case there was no reason for him not to be. He wasn't being dense in this case, he was just uninformed. So, Sarah was willing to let this case slide.

"I'll keep that in mind," she returned, smirking slightly herself. "_You_ just keep in mind that Kairi and I are counting on you to get us those supplies. We can get the sleeping stuff on our own, but we're counting on you for the fishing tackle." She wasn't going to mention the hunting rifle, and with any luck Riku would forget about it entirely; the last thing _anyone_ needed was for someone so obviously unstable to have access to such an unambiguously deadly weapon. "Don't futz this one up, okay?"

"Right," the silver-haired boy said, his smirk becoming wider and more clearly amused. "I won't futz things up." He chuckled. "Futz; where do you come up with these weird words, Sora?"

_Better that than certain _other_ words I could have used,_ Sarah didn't say. "It's just a natural talent, I suppose." She smirked.

"Well, if you say so," Riku said, reaching out to muss up Sora's hair; as if anyone could do even a bit of damage to a hairstyle that was so ridiculous to start out with.

"Well, if you're done trying to fix my hair, something I don't thing can actually be _done_ by the way, I think I should see about getting Kairi home," she smiled easily. "The sun's almost set, and I don't think Kairi's family in going to be particularly happy with me if I don't get her home before full dark." She grinned, waving to Riku and trying not to laugh at the "fishslapped" expression on his face. "I'll see you tomorrow, Riku."


	13. Last night, last day

_Song list:__ L'Arc~en~Ciel "Ready, steady, go!"; Porno Graffiti "Mellissa."_

As Kairi tugged her away from the small dock – barely distinguishable from the one that she had seen on the Destiny Islands – Sarah fell into step with the other girl, waiting until they were both out of Riku's earshot to begin what was likely to be a particularly interesting conversation.

"That was a good bluff; I have no idea where your house is."

"You're from another world, aren't you?" Kairi asked, and the expression that the younger girl turned on Sarah was one of such earnest, wide-eyed curiosity that it was all she could do to keep herself from laughing at the sheer adorability of the expression.

"That's been the general assumption I've been operating on," she slanted a half-lidded "this is probably stupid" look at Kairi as the two of them continued on their way. "Unless you've actually heard of a place called California."

"No, I haven't," Kairi said. "Is _that_ the name of your world? It's very nice."

Biting "her" tongue so she wouldn't be tempted to laugh, Sarah couldn't quite suppress the amused smile on "her" face. "No, California's the name of my home state. The _planet_ I live on is called Earth; or Terra, or Chikuu, if you want to bring other languages into this," she paused for a moment, casting back through her memory for the third language she spoke; though she would have been the first to admit that she didn't speak _that_ one nearly as well as she did the other two. "I'd tell you the German name of my planet, but I can't remember it off the top of my head."

"Wow," Kairi said, turning back to Sarah with an expression of wonder on her face. "Your world has _three_ different languages?"

Sarah laughed softly, as the two of them continued their slow walk. "Oh, there are quite a few more than just those three," she said, reaching back to run "her" hands through "her" hair. "And no one really uses Latin in conversation anymore; it's mostly a language for scientists, historians, and scholars." And the 40k 'verse, where it was known as High Gothic, but _that_ would have taken entirely too long to explain.

"So, your world has an entire language just for people whose job it is to study things?" the younger girl asked, seeming both amused and a bit charmed by the idea. "Do all of them learn two languages, just to be able to communicate with other people?"

"No, not really," she said, pausing for a moment to consider how to explain the significance of Latin in relation to science and other areas of study. "They mostly use it for classifications and other things like that; so-called scientific names, you understand?"

"Yeah, I think I do," Kairi said, then she smiled. "Your world must be an interesting place."

"It definitely has its good points," she said, as the two of them continued walking.

They had begun treading on distinctly familiar territory by this time, so Sarah knew that she would have to get back into her "Sora" persona soon if she didn't want anyone else making the connections that Kairi already had.

"Well, good night," Kairi said, as the two of them reached what seemed to be the halfway point between Kairi's house and Sora's own.

"Good night, Kairi," she said, tilting her head slightly as she smiled at the younger girl.

Just after Kairi had turned away, when she had clearly been about to start making her way back to her own home, the younger girl turned back to face her. "Sora's mom goes to work early during the week, so she might already be gone by the time you wake up."

"That's good to know," she said, having been wondering on and off all day just how she would manage to prepare for her upcoming offworld journey without drawing any more attention than she clearly already had. "Thanks for keeping me posted."

"You're welcome, I guess," Kairi said, still looking a bit confused.

"I'll see you tomorrow, then," she said, clapping Kairi's right shoulder as she herself turned to leave for Sora's house.

"Wait," Kairi called suddenly; Sarah paused, turning to look back over Sora's right shoulder with a slightly raised eyebrow. An expression that she couldn't quite read passed over the younger girl's face, but it was gone almost as quickly as it had come, so she dismissed it almost as fast. "I've been meaning to ask you this since I… well, since I found out, but then we started talking about what your world was like, and then it started getting late and we needed to get back home, well _I _needed to get back home, I know you can't really get back home without some kind of help, and I'm really sorry about that-"

"You know you're rambling, right?" she asked, smiling softly at the younger girl as she fell silent; she'd already turned to face Kairi more squarely, just to avoid getting a crick in Sora's neck while the two of them talked.

"Yeah, I guess I was," Kairi said, laughing in a way that sounded distinctly rueful. "What I meant to ask you, before we both got distracted, was what you're name is," the younger girl said at last.

"It's Sarah; with an 'h'," she said, giving the specifics out of long-ingrained habit.

Turning to leave once more, wanting to have at least _some_ light to navigate by on her way to Sora's house, Sarah found Kairi walking beside her once again.

"I thought you might want some help getting back to Sora's house, since you've only been there once before," the younger gild said, in response to Sarah's curious expression.

"Decent of you; thanks," she said, as Kairi linked her arm with Sora's and the two of them made their way down the path to the kid's house. Kairi laughed softly, drawing Sarah's attention away from the list of supplies that she had been mentally compiling.

"It's just, I finally understand what you meant when you told Riku that he was a syllable off when he was calling to you this morning."

"Ah, so he told you about that," she said, thinking back with some amusement on this strangest of all days, back when she'd first thought that all of this was just some kind of a dream; she'd long since dismissed that claim.

Dreams, even particularly vivid ones, were simply not this detailed and did _not_ last this long.

"That was also something I wanted to ask you," the younger girl said, stopping in her tracks just a few feet from the front door of Sora's house; Sarah stopped as well, not wanting to pull the younger girl off her feet, and at the same time curious about just what other question Kairi wanted to ask her. "Riku told me that you called him Kadaj, when you were still half-asleep," the younger girl continued, and Sarah got the distinct feeling that she already knew just what the question was going to be. "He didn't really think it meant anything, and I'm pretty sure he's forgotten about it completely by now, but it seemed a little strange to me that Sora would say something like that." There was a faraway expression on Kairi's face as she spoke, but it cleared and was replaced with a gentle smile. "Then, when I realized you weren't actually Sora, I also realized what you meant when you said that. Kadaj is one of your friends, back on your world, isn't he."

_How to properly explain this without sounding crazy?_ Sarah mused; she didn't even know if they _had_ fandom here on whatever planet this was, much less how those "outside" of certain fandoms – or outside of fandom itself – thought of those inside. "I guess you could say that," she said, settling for a half-truth again.

"What do you mean?" Kairi asked, her expression becoming one of curiosity again.

"We don't really know each other very well," she said, deciding against explaining that Kadaj – and his "brothers" Yazoo and Loz – was a character in a franchise that she was sort of a fan of, for the interrelated reasons that it was fairly late, she was getting tired, and Sora's mom wasn't likely to be very happy with "him" if she stayed out here talking for too long. "Look, it's getting late, and I'm sure your parents won't be too happy with me if they find me keeping you out here all night," Sarah said, having to stifle a brief yawn even as she spoke.

Kairi yawned outright, making the younger girl giggle while Sarah herself chuckled softly. "Okay, I guess I can see your point, Sarah." The amusement on the younger girl's face was short-lived, however, and was soon replaced with a soft expression that Sarah didn't quite have time to identify before she found the younger girl hugging her tightly. "Have a good night's sleep, Sarah. And, don't worry: I'll help you find your way back home," the younger girl said, with such firm conviction that Sarah would have believed it herself if she hadn't already known what was coming.

"Thanks," she said, holding Kairi a bit tighter; she was a good kid, and while it was a shame that one of her friends was a self-absorbed prick with his head so far up his ass that he could lick his own kidneys, she was fairly sure that the only thing drowning Riku would accomplish now would be to _delay_ the coming Heartless invasion. The floodgates had already been opened, and the only option left was to close them; there was nothing for it but to make the journey. "Thanks a lot," she said, briefly squeezing Kairi tighter before the two of them separated and Sarah made her way up the stone-lined path to Sora's house alone.

Turning to wink over "her" left shoulder. She smiled slightly as Kairi waved to her, then turned her attention back to the path, making her way up to the door of the house where Sora and his family lived. Said door opened before she could even reach out for the knob, however, so Sarah tucked "her" hands back into "her" pockets and simply waited. Sora's mom stood in the doorway, looking down at her son with an expression of parental concern that was very easy for Sarah to place.

"What were you doing out so late, Sora?"

"Sorry, Mom." And that really did get easier to say with repetition. "Kairi and I were talking, and I kind of lost track of time."

"Well, I'm glad that the two of you are such good friends, but I'd still like you to get home before it's dark," Sora's mother said, wagging an admonishing finger at "him". "You're a growing boy, Sora; you need your sleep."

_Well, two out of three ain't bad,_ Sarah reflected, biting the inside of "her" cheek to keep from smirking in amusement. It _had_ passed into full dark by now, and she _was_ beginning to get tired. She still had things to take care of before she could actually _go_ to sleep, yes, but that was beside the point.

Letting Sora's mother guide her back to the room she had awakened in, Sarah bid the older woman goodnight and then made her way over to the desk that she hadn't been able to see before she'd so unceremoniously arrived here. As her eyes began to adjust to the low light of the room, allowing Sarah to see the placement of objects within Sora's room and hence to stop relying exclusively on her sense of touch to navigate, she found that there was indeed a small lamp atop the desk itself. Every desk seemed to be equipped with one of them – computer desks being the only exception in her experience – and Sarah was glad to note that this one followed the trend as well.

Feeling along the base, up the neck, and across the head of the lamp, Sarah soon located the switch in the center of the lamp's rounded head. Gripping the switch so that she wouldn't lose track of it, Sarah turned the chair around so that its back now faced the desk she stood in of, grabbed one of the spare sheets of loose-leaf paper on Sora's desk – their whiteness still reflecting the light coming in through the windows even though it _was_ pretty pitiful – and finally turned around so that she herself was facing away from the desk and its small lamp. The comparative flood of light as she turned the lamp on _didn't_, therefore, hurt Sarah's eyes quite as much as it would have if she'd actually been facing the lamp, but it did completely destroy her night-vision and leave her blinking harshly in its wake.

Rubbing her eyes to soothe away the slight ache caused by the sudden light, Sarah settled herself down in the chair and focused her attention back on the supply list that she had been mentally composing when she had found the time to think. The first item on the list was, of course, to assemble a First Aid kit so that she wouldn't be forced to rely too much on expensive healing potions or MP-draining spells; and for that, she would need to gather – or make, but that was more a last resort than anything else – bandages, alcohol or some other kind of disinfectant for cleaning wounds, splints, possibly a tourniquet if she could find the materials to properly fasten one, and band-aids for anything too small for a cloth bandage.

Some people might have found that kind of planning excessive, probably particularly if they had played the game before, but her dad and Big Mack himself had both taught her that it was a hell of a lot better to have something and not need it than it was to need something and not have it.

The next item – or several items, depending on how you looked at it; though she was still going to list them as just one – was several days' worth of clean clothes; because there was no way in hell that she was going to spend an unknown amount of days and nights without showering. The next item after that was, naturally, provisions for the journey that she was about to undertake. Perishable items to be eaten first, and then more long-lasting foods that she could take on the ship for eating while they were in transit. The next after that were backup weapons, whatever blades or bludgeons that she could lay her hands to, since she wasn't going to make the mistake of relying exclusively on the Keyblade the way Sora had.

As she'd been told before, on many different occasions and by many different people including Big Mack himself: use all weapons, but trust only in yourself. You had to _be_ a weapon, to have the proper mindset, before you could expect to use any other weapon proficiently.

Next on the list were the various toiletries she was going to be making use of during the course of her of her journey. And last, but certainly not least by any means, was the duffel bag – or at least the very large travel bag – that she was going to take to the hotel, and the smaller pack that she was going to carry a day's supplies in.

Settling back into Sora's chair, Sarah revised the list she had made, looking for any essential items that she had missed, or anything that she might want to add. Finding nothing of the sort, Sarah got up, folded the list in half, plucked the journal she had started out of the oversized pocket of Sora's gray shorts, tucked said list neatly inside the front cover, and then slipped the thing back inside "her" left pocket and started to undress.

This was the last night that she was going to have the luxury of doing so, Sarah knew, and so she was going to enjoy it while she could; on this world, at least. Flicking off Sora's desk lamp, Sarah made her way back through the now almost-oppressive darkness back to Sora's bed. When "her" shins made contact with the bed frame, her night-vision having been degraded enough to be almost useless at that point, Sarah removed "her" shorts and tossed the shirt she had been carrying onto the carpet. Yawning widely one last time, Sarah climbed up into the bed and made herself comfortable.

Sighing contentedly as she closed "her" eyes, Sarah slowly drifted off to sleep in the dark, silent confines of Sora's room.

_KH1_

Awakened the next morning by a sense of urgency that she would have been hard-pressed to explain to anyone else who had been in the room with her, Sarah looked over at the clock. Just as she'd been expecting, it was almost a full half-hour before she'd set the alarm to go off; that was the way it always seemed to work for her: the alarm was just something to get her body to wake itself up at an appointed time, she'd never ended up actually _hearing_ the thing. Even her own iPod alarm back home, she just left on because she'd always enjoyed having music to go along with her morning routine.

Shutting off the alarm clock she'd found before its harsh ringing could tempt her to pitch it at the nearest wall and then straight out the window – not to mention prompting Sora's mom to wonder just why he had set his alarm during summer vacation in the first place – Sarah climbed out of bed, ran "her" hands through "her" hair in an effort as familiar to her as it was most likely futile, and shifted to seat "herself" on the edge of Sora's bed. Pulling the clothes that "she" had worn yesterday back on – she'd only worn them once, so they were good for at least _one_ more day of light-to-moderate activity, though she was definitely changing them when she got to Traverse Town and managed to finagle a shower – and made her way over to Sora's closet. Sarah looked for and quickly found a backpack large enough to suit her needs while "she" and her future traveling companions were making their way from world to world on their appointed quest.

Scanning the racks of clothes in front of her, Sarah took a moment to recall the kind of environments that they were going to be dealing with _on_ said quest; it only took her a few moments.

_All right, so: desert, jungle, what amounts to someone's back garden gone a bit wild, a tamer version of Gotham City, someplace completely underwater, a small ship, another city, what pretty much amounts to a steampunk castle, an arena, and somewhere that I won't really be getting to until this is pretty much all over and done with,_ she mused, tapping "her" lower lip with "her" pointer-finger the way she always tended to do when she was deep in thought or making plans. Of the environments that she, Donald, and Goofy would be facing, she really only had to worry about actual _environmental_ hazards in three of them: Agrabah, whose hot, dry environs would suck the moisture right out of you, and whose almost blinding sun reflecting off the wide expanse of sand could easily disorient you, getting you lost and dropping you dead of exposure and heat-exhaustion if you were careless, unlucky, or stupid; Deep Jungle, where it would be entirely too easy to catch a foot on one of the many vines and creepers running along the jungle floor and violently twist or break one's ankle while battling Heartless, to say nothing of the various kinds of insect – both bloodsucking and not – that made their home in every jungle that she had ever read about back home; Hollow Bastion was going to be a bitch and a half to plan for, not because of any natural hazards – there were precious few _natural_ things in that architect's-nightmare-designed-by-a-mad-Spark-on-L SD of an excuse for a castle – but because the very things that would actually keep her safe from myriad hazards of the environment there: climbing ropes, pitons, and harnesses for a start; were the very things that she couldn't get without access to a fair amount of money and a sporting good store to spend it at.

Sarah hated that; not being able to adequately prepare for hazardous situations grated on her nerves in a way that few other things ever had or ever could; still, this was what she had to work with, so this was what she was going to use.

Zipping open the faded-yellow backpack that she had found in Sora's closet, Sarah began to take out the clothes that she would need during the journey she was about to undertake. She didn't much care what colors they were, so long as they weren't gaudy and they didn't clash _too_ horribly. She honestly preferred to wear darker shades or more muted tones; but, then again, she would have honestly have preferred _not to be here in the first damn place_, so it really wasn't like her personal preferences counted for much at the moment.

Riffling through Sora's closet, Sarah came up with two pairs of long pants – useful for keeping bugs and other annoying things off of her in the jungle, or for keeping her warm in the cold desert night – a windbreaker – good for pretty much the same thing, though it wouldn't be quite as effective at retaining heat as the long pants she'd slung over "her" left arm; or a real jacket, but she doubted that she'd have much of a chance finding one considering the climate – several pairs of shorts and short-sleeved shirts, and or all things a dark-blue hoodie. Chuckling softly at the sheer incongruity of finding something like _that_ in Sora's closet – sure, the kid had his share of hooded outfits, but most of them had been sleeveless; however the hell _that_ had ended up working out – she decided to take it along just for the hell of it. She'd liked wearing hoodies even _before_ playing Prototype.

Checking Sora's closet one last time, Sarah made sure that there wasn't anything useful she had missed. There wasn't, but Sarah had always believed it was better to be _over_-prepared than the reverse. Especially considering what she knew was going to be coming tomorrow. Of course, no one in their right mind was likely to think that you _could_ be _over_-prepared for the end of the world.

Moving back over to Sora's bed, Sarah removed the clothes from "her" arm, let Sora's backpack fall from "her" shoulder at last, and yawned briefly as she began to roll up the previously hanging clothes and pack them away in preparation for her upcoming journey.

Once that was finished, Sarah turned her attention to the large chest of drawers set flush against the wall midway between Sora's bed and his closet. Making her way over to it, Sarah found that the bottom two drawers contained socks and underwear, which was in stark contrast to the one she had in her closet back at home; Sarah sometimes wondered if she was the only one to keep her own socks and underwear in the _top_ drawers rather than the bottom.

Picking out a variety of socks, thicker for when she would need better insulation against the cold and thinner for when she would need to pay more attention to the heat, Sarah rolled them a bit tighter so that they would take up that much less space, then made her way back over to Sora's bed to pack them. Finishing with that task, Sarah returned to the chest of drawers, grabbed every last pair of underwear in the second-bottommost drawer with both of "her" hands, and returned to Sora's bed and the backpack on top of it.

Rolling up the individual pairs and packing them away, Sarah found herself wondering once more just what kind of weapons – improvised or otherwise – she would be able to collect for herself here. Knives were the most likely; everyone she'd ever known of had a set of knives in their kitchen, bought for slicing, chopping, and peeling vegetables if they didn't eat meat for whatever reason.

Maybe they wouldn't have a set of carbon steel knives-for-all-occasions, or a bread knife large enough to double as a short sword, she'd still be able to handle cutters and peelers and steak knives well enough to make the stupid or the unwary regret ever having tangled with her.

Once she had finished packing the last of "her" clothes, Sarah stood up and stretched to wake herself up a bit more, and to work out the kinks that came naturally from sitting in any one position for too long. Making her way over to the door of Sora's room, Sarah pressed "her" right ear against it and waited for a few moments. Collecting weapons, assembling medkits, and stocking provisions wasn't really something she could really do while Sora's mom was still kicking around the house; it being something that would have raised inconvenient questions if "she" were spotted in the process; likely enough starting with just what in the hell "she" thought "she" was doing.

Though perhaps not so bluntly put.

Still, the fact remained that if she wanted to avoid complications at this stage, then she would have to avoid Sora's mom as well. To that end, Sarah held her silence and listened at the door for any sound indicating that Sora's mom was still in the house with her.

The sound of footsteps, muffled though they were by the carpet in the hall, propelled Sarah into action. Moving quickly but quietly back down the length of Sora's room, she shoved the kid's backpack just far enough under the bed that no one who wasn't actually looking for it would be able to see the thing, then quickly climbed back into Sora's bed and pulled up his covers far enough over "her" body so that the clothes "she" was wearing wouldn't be visible to anyone who didn't check for them. Closing "her" eyes and relaxing as best as she could under the circumstances, Sarah found herself both pleased and rather relieved at the fact that she hadn't yet picked out a pair of shoes to wear.

A few seconds later, the door to Sora's room opened, and Sarah heard someone making their way inside.

Relaxing herself to the point where she probably would have been able to fool the more observant of her brothers – or even Big Mack himself, if only for a few seconds – Sarah focused on one of the meditations that a sensei whose name she couldn't quite call to mind at the moment had taught her. Focusing her thoughts on a point just beyond what she would have been able to see if "her" eyes were still open, Sarah let herself fall further into that state of mixed awareness and not-quite-awareness even as she heard the person – most likely Sora's mom – making their way into Sora's room with "her".

When that same someone kissed "her" softly on "her" upturned right cheek, Sarah thought that it had to have been Sora's mom who'd come into the room with "her" – this kind of thing really did seem like more of a Mom thing than a Dad thing; at least, _her_ dad didn't do things like that – and that supposition was only confirmed by the newcomer's words:

"Have a great day, Sora honey. Your father and I will be home just as soon as we can."

For a few, long moments, as Sora's mother was making her way out of his room, Sarah found herself wondering just what she and Sora's as-yet-unseen father did for a living; what their names were; and, out of the almost morbid sent of curiosity that she had developed regarding underdeveloped background characters in stories just like this one, what they had been thinking and doing when the sky had opened up and the world itself apart all around them.

Neither of them had been developed at all during the course of the one-and-a-half games in the series that she had actually played; she pretty much doubted they would be in the future, either. Their only real purpose in-game had been to show that Sora wasn't an orphan, or else vat-grown in a factory somewhere. Hell, the both of them combined had had less of a presence in their own son's story than Fumio Fukamachi had had in Guyver; and _he'd_ just been brought in to showcase Chronos' true ruthlessness unleashed.

When Sora's mother left, closing the door behind her the way she'd likely been taught to do by her own parents, Sarah held herself in meditation until she could at least be reasonably sure that Sora's father wasn't going to be adding his own goodbyes, then opened "her" eyes and stared at Sora's door for a few, long moments.\

They seemed like nice enough people, or at least Sora's mom did, so the fact that she was pretty much leaving them to their fates when the world ended didn't sit well with her at all. Still, it wasn't as if there was anything she could really _do_ about that. They weren't likely to take a letter from a mysterious, otherworldly benefactor seriously; anything she _said_ would sound completely pants-on-head crazy without some kind of extraordinary proof to back up "her" story. And, by the time she got her hands on the Keyblade, this world was pretty much done for.

And, any way you looked at it, she had no one to vouch for her story in any case.

Frustrating as it was not to be able to help people who'd shown her such hospitality, even if they hadn't ultimately known what they were doing, it looked like she was going to have to leave Sora's parents to their fate. She hated that thought, but unfortunately hating something wasn't likely to make it any less true. Not even here, in a place where magic was a fundamental force of the universe.

Levering herself up and out of Sora's bed for the second and last time, Sarah yanked the backpack back out from under it and slung the thing over "her" right shoulder. There were a lot of things that she was going to have to do today if she wanted to be prepared for tomorrow; best she got to them quickly. _First things first, of course_, she mused, shifting her course so that she was headed for the bathroom.

There was bound to be a closet nearby that she could raid for the supplies necessary to construct her First Aid kit. And if not, then she would probably at least find it somewhere in the general vicinity. Linen closets always seemed to be close to the bathroom, for convenience's sake if not out of respect for tradition.

Finding herself humming softly under "her" breath as she made her way down the hall, Sarah almost stopped out of hand, since both of her encounters with Sora's friends indicated that that wasn't something he was known for doing at all. But hell, it wasn't like there was anyone in the house to hear her, and this really _was_ the last chance he was going to get to indulge herself.

At least for the rest of today.

"Ready, steady, can't hold me back," she sang softly, standing just in front of the closet beside the bathroom. "Ready, steady, give me good luck." Pulling open the door, Sarah found that this was indeed the linen closet just like she'd been hoping for. "Ready, steady, never look back." Gathering up three washcloths and a small towel – long and short strips for bandaging wounds – Sarah draped them over "her" left arm and continued to look through the closet in search of rubbing alcohol or some other kind of disinfectant; it wouldn't do anyone any good to bind up wounds that hadn't been cleaned. "Let's get started; ready, steady, go!"

Not having found the rest of what she was looking for in the closet, Sarah moved into the bathroom itself.

"Fukitonde yuku fukei, korugaru you ni mae e." The compartment behind the bathroom mirror was just the same as the one in her house, and Sarah smiled softly at the sheer familiarity of it. "Kurushi magure demo, hyoteki wa mou minagasanai."

Plucking out a selection of larger and smaller band-aids from the various boxes that she found, Sarah was also pleased to note that there was a nearly full bottle of rubbing alcohol sitting on one of the higher shelves. She picked it up and tucked it into the crook of "her" left arm.

"Ate ni narani chizu, yakute shimaeba ii sa." Making "her" way back down the hall on her way to the house's kitchen, Sarah smiled just a bit wider. She could almost swear, that if she just concentrated hard enough, she could hear L'Arc~en~Ciel playing in the background.

It was kind of fun.

"Uzumoreta de tsukami torou." Reaching the kitchen, already beginning to ride the wave of energy that most of her favorite songs summoned up from somewhere deep inside of her. Sarah swung in on the threshold and continued on her way into the room. Stopping just long enough to drop all of the items that she had collected off on the tabletop, Sarah continued on her way over to the drawers and cupboards that made up a good proportion of the far wall. Along with the sink that she was going to be putting to use later.

"Muchuu de, hayaku!" she sang out, throwing "her" head back as she continued moving forward. "Kake, nukete kita. Urusai kurai ni harisaki sou na kodou no takanari. Hibite, yonde!" throwing "her" head back once more, Sarah pulled open the drawer in front of her and then almost instantly dismissed its contents as useless: measuring spoons and the like. She closed that door almost as quickly as she had opened it. "Iru, kimi no koe. Koko de tachidomaru you na jikan wa nai sa. Ready, steady, go!"

Moving on, she checked the next three drawers.

"Kazoe kirena kizu, kakae konde ite mo," the first one had only two things that she was interested in: a roll of tape and a hammer, which she tucked into the left pocket of Sora's shorts. "Chotto yasotto ja, tamashi made wa ubawasenai." The second had nothing of the sort. But the third one more than made up for the deficiencies of the first and the rather underwhelming finds in the first: the third was the knife drawer. "Ano oka no mukau de, kimi ni deaeta nara." She took four of the standard-sized steak knives, two paring knives – as they would be much easier to conceal and would do nearly as much damage if used right – and one more after a moment's consideration. "Nani kara hana sou, sonna koto bakari omou yo."

Making her way back to the kitchen table, Sarah dropped off the knives that she had elected to take on her trip. There had also been a mini-cleaver in that drawer, but anyone who wasn't an idiot could see that _those_ things were a hell of a lot better suited to intimidation than they were to actual combat.

"Muchuu de, hayaku!" pulling out the chair closest to her, Sarah plopped down into it and grabbed the towel nearest "her" right elbow.

"Kake, nukete kita. Urusai kurai ni harisaki sou na kodou no takanari." Wrapping the knives that she had gathered up in the towel so that they wouldn't shift around inside the pack while she was trying to essentially escape Ragnarök, Sarah made herself a mental note to secure them better once she made it to Traverse Town.

"Hibite, yonde!" digging under the socks that she had already packed for her trip, Sarah carefully nestled the bundle of knives in between two of the shirts that she had packed beforehand. "Iru, kimi no koe." Once she had set the backpack she was working with back to rights, Sarah zipped the thing back up and left the table again. "Koko de tachidomaru you na jikan wa nai sa. Ready, steady, go!"

The next things she needed to find was a pair of scissors, so that she could begin making bandages to put in her First Aid kit – scratch-built as it was going to be – and something to hold the kit itself. Her best bet for that was probably going to end up being one of Sora's lunch boxes or something like that. "Ready, steady, can't hold me back. Ready, steady, give me good luck. Ready, steady, never look back. Let's get started, ready, steady, go!"

With half of the drawers in Sora's family's modest kitchen searched, and a pair of scissors in Sora's right pocket for her trouble, Sarah turned her attention to the cabinets.

"Kokoro wa, hashiru!" the first three that she checked were filled with pots, pans, and other cooking paraphernalia that Sarah had less than zero interest in at this point. "Ano sora no shita." The fourth of the cabinets was under the sink, so it came as no surprise when that one was filled with cleaning products and sponges, and other things of that ilk. "Karamawari suru kimochi ga sakebi dasu no o tomerarenai. " The next one down the line was full of Tupperware containers, or something that looked enough like them that it didn't make much of a difference. "Kimi made, todoke!" Marking that one off for when she started gathering provisions for her trip, Sarah turned her attention to the last cabinet on this side of the room. "Kitto ato sukoshi."

The lunchbox that "she" was now holding both looked and felt like something out of one of those retro shops that sold stuff from the 50s, but it would serve her purposes well enough, so Sarah put it out of her mind. "Atsuku hizashi ga terasu kono michi no mukou. Ready, steady, go? Ah please, trust me!"

Making her way back to the table, Sarah settled back down, set the now-open lunchbox down just outside of her work area, and began to gather up the towels and washcloths that she had previously found to make bandages out of; she left out one of the washcloths so that it could be used for cleaning wounds if she ended up needing to do so, of course. By this time, Sarah was starting to seriously miss her iPod; having music during long, monotonous jobs like this had always seemed to make them go by a hell of a lot faster.

Still, just because she didn't have her iPod, that didn't mean she didn't have to go without music.

"Kimi no te de, kirisaite tooi, hi no kioku wo," grabbing the scissors, Sarah set about methodically dismembering the various towels and washcloths she'd placed on the table in front of her. "Kanashimi no, iki no ne wo, tometekure yo. Saa, ai ni kogareta mune wo tsuranuke!"

As she was rolling up her makeshift bandages and packing them neatly away inside what was most likely one of the lunchboxes that Sora used for school, Sarah realized that she had forgotten splints when she had made her initial calculations about what she was going to need for this First Aid kit of hers. Sure, magic opened up quite a few more possibilities for dealing with wounds than any "normal" person could ever have at their disposal, but that still didn't change the fact that Ethers and Potions – for restoring magical power and physical health, respectively – were pretty damned expensive. And, unlike back when she was the only one who _wasn't_ a pre-programmed A.I. with all the limited-responses that implied, here people would actually _notice_ that "Sora" seemed more interested in hunting Heartless for money – or Munny, here – than "he" was in saving the various worlds.

"Asu ga kuru hazu no sora wo mite, mayou, bakari no Kokoro, motea mashiteru." With the last of the towels reduced to strips suitable for bandaging wounds or tying tourniquets, whichever they ended up needing to be used for, Sarah decided to put aside the issue of splints, casts, and/or crutches until she'd made it to Traverse Town and had a chance to talk to Squall. It wasn't like she had many options for making those kinds of things here, anyway.

"Katawara no tori ga habataita, doko ka, hikari wo mitsukerareta, no ka na." Picking up her newly packed First Aid kit, Sarah packed it in with the rest of the stuff that she was going to be leaving in her hotel room once she'd left the broken remains of whatever planet this was far behind. "Naa, omae no se ni, ore mo nosetekurenai, ka."

Lifting the backpack to test its weight, Sarah found that she could bear it at least reasonably comfortably.

"Soshite, ichiban takai toko de, okizari ni shite, yasashisa kara, toozakete." That was good, since she was going to have to move quickly when Zero Hour came, and therefore she wanted to be as mobile as she could manage while still being up to her own standards of preparedness.

"Kimi no te de, kirisaite, tooi ni no, kioku wo." Slinging Sora's backpack firmly over "her" left shoulder, Sarah made her way back down the hall to Sora's room so she could drop it off.

"Kanashimi no, iki no ne wo, tometekure yo."

_This next part is going to be kind of interesting,_ Sarah mused, setting the backpack she'd been working with for a fair bit of the morning down at the head of Sora's bed, so that she could get to it easier when Zero Hour rolled around. "Saa, ai ni kogareta mune wo tsuranuke!"

It would involve food, and if her many camping trips with her family had taught her anything, it was that any situation that involved pre-made food and travel plans was interesting; sometimes annoying as all _fuck_, but always interesting.


End file.
